Scripture quotes:
I. The Uniqueness of Mary as the Mother of God
Gen. 3:15 - we see from the very beginning that God gives
Mary a unique role in salvation history. God says "I will put enmity
between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed." This refers to
Jesus (the "emnity") and Mary (the "woman"). The phrase
"her seed" (spermatos) is not seen elsewhere in Scripture.
Gen 3:15 / Rev. 12:1 - the Scriptures begin and end with the
woman battling satan. This teaches us that Jesus and Mary are the new Adam and
the new Eve.
John 2:4, 19:26 - Jesus calls Mary "woman" as she
is called in Gen. 3:15. Just as Eve was the mother of the old creation, Mary is
the mother of the new creation. This woman's seed will crush the serpent's
skull.
Isaiah 7:14; Matt. 1:23 - a virgin (the Greek word used is
"parthenos") will bear a Son named Emmanuel, which means "God is
with us." John 1:14 - God in flesh dwelt among us. Mary is the Virgin
Mother of God.
Matt. 2:11 - Luke emphasizes Jesus is with Mary His Mother,
and the magi fall down before both of them, worshiping Jesus.
Luke 1:35 - the child will be called holy, the Son of God.
Mary is the Mother of the Son of God, or the Mother of God (the
"Theotokos").
Luke 1:28 - "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with
you." These are the words spoken by God and delivered to us by the angel
Gabriel (who is a messenger of God). Thus, when Catholics recite this verse
while praying the Rosary, they are uttering the words of God.
Luke 1:28 - also, the phrase "full of grace" is
translated from the Greek word "kecharitomene." This is a unique
title given to Mary, and suggests a perfection of grace from a past event. Mary
is not just "highly favored." She has been perfected in grace by God.
"Full of grace" is only used to describe one other person - Jesus
Christ in John 1:14.
Luke 1:38 - Mary's fiat is "let it be done to me
according to thy word." Mary is the perfect model of faith in God, and is
worthy of our veneration.
Luke 1:42 - "Blessed are you among women, and blessed
is the fruit of your womb, Jesus." The phrase "blessed are you among
women" really means "you are most blessed of all women." A
circumlocution is used because there is no superlative in the Greek language.
Note also that Elizabeth praises Mary first, and then Jesus. This is hyperdulia
(but not latria which is worship owed to God alone). We too can go through Mary
to praise Jesus. Finally, Catholics repeat these divinely inspired words of
Elizabeth in the Rosary.
Luke 1:43 - Elizabeth's use of "Mother of my Lord"
is the equivalent of "Holy Mary, Mother of God" which Catholics pray
in the Rosary. The formula is simple: Jesus is a divine person, and this person
is God. Mary is Jesus' Mother, so Mary is the mother of God (Mary is not just
the Mother of Jesus' human nature - mothers are mothers of persons, not
natures).
Luke 1:44 - Mary's voice causes John the Baptist to leap for
joy in Elizabeth's womb. Luke is teaching us that Mary is our powerful
intercessor.
Luke 1:46 - Mary claims that her soul magnifies the Lord.
This is a bold statement from a young Jewish girl from Nazareth. Her statement
is a strong testimony to her uniqueness. Mary, as our Mother and intercessor,
also magnifies our prayers.
Luke 1:48 - Mary prophesies that all generations shall call
her blessed, as Catholics do in the "Hail Mary" prayer. What
Protestant churches have existed in all generations (none), and how many of
them call Mary blessed with special prayers and devotions?
Gal. 4:4 - God sent His Son, born of a woman, to redeem us.
Mary is the woman with the redeemer. By calling Mary co-redemptrix, we are
simply calling Mary "the woman with the redeemer." This is because
"co" is from the Latin word "cum" which means
"with." Therefore, "co-redemptrix" means "woman with
the redeemer." Mary had a unique but subordinate role to Jesus in
salvation.
Eph. 1:1; Phil. 1:1; Col. 1:2 - the word "saints"
(in Hebrew "qaddiysh") means "holy" ones. So Mary is called
Holy, the greatest Saint of all.
Luke 2:35 - Simeon prophesies that a sword would also pierce
Mary's soul. Mary thus plays a very important role in our redemption. While
Jesus' suffering was all that we needed for redemption, God desired Mary to
participate on a subordinate level in her Son's suffering, just as he allows us
to participate through our own sufferings.
Luke 2:19,51 - Mary kept in mind all these things as she
pondered them in her heart. Catholics remember this by devoting themselves to
Mary's Immaculate Heart and all the treasures and wisdom and knowledge
contained therein.
II. Mary - the Immaculate Ark of the New Covenant
Exodus 25:11-21 - the ark of the Old Covenant was made of
the purest gold for God's Word. Mary is the ark of the New Covenant and is the
purest vessel for the Word of God made flesh.
2 Sam. 6:7 - the Ark is so holy and pure that when Uzzah
touched it, the Lord slew him. This shows us that the Ark is undefiled. Mary
the Ark of the New Covenant is even more immaculate and undefiled, spared by
God from original sin so that she could bear His eternal Word in her womb.
1 Chron. 13:9-10 - this is another account of Uzzah and the
Ark. For God to dwell within Mary the Ark, Mary had to be conceived without
sin. For Protestants to argue otherwise would be to say that God would let the
finger of Satan touch His Son made flesh. This is incomprehensible.
1 Chron. 15 and 16 - these verses show the awesome everence
the Jews had for the Ark - veneration, vestments, songs, harps, lyres, cymbals,
trumpets.
Luke 1:39 / 2 Sam. 6:2 - Luke's conspicuous comparison's
between Mary and the Ark described by Samuel underscores the reality of Mary as
the undefiled and immaculate Ark of the New Covenant. In these verses, Mary
(the Ark) arose and went / David arose and went to the Ark. There is a clear
parallel between the Ark of the Old and the Ark of the New Covenant.
Luke 1:41 / 2 Sam. 6:16 - John the Baptist / King David leap
for joy before Mary / Ark. So should we leap for joy before Mary the immaculate
Ark of the Word made flesh.
Luke 1:43 / 2 Sam. 6:9 - How can the Mother / Ark of the
Lord come to me? It is a holy privilege. Our Mother wants to come to us and
lead us to Jesus.
Luke 1:56 / 2 Sam. 6:11 and 1 Chron. 13:14 - Mary / the Ark remained
in the house for about three months.
Rev 11:19 - at this point in history, the Ark of the Old
Covenant was not seen for six centuries (see 2 Macc. 2:7), and now it is
finally seen in heaven. The Jewish people would have been absolutely amazed at
this. However, John immediately passes over this fact and describes the
"woman" clothed with the sun in Rev. 12:1. John is emphasizing that
Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant and who, like the Old ark, is now worthy of
veneration and praise. Also remember that Rev. 11:19 and Rev. 12:1 are tied
together because there was no chapter and verse at the time these texts were
written.
Rev 12:1 - the "woman" that John is describing is
Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant, with the moon under her feet, and on her head
a crown of twelve stars. Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, so
Mary, with the moon under her feet, reflects the glory of the Sun of Justice,
Jesus Christ.
Rev. 12:17 - this verse tells us that Mary's offspring are
those who keep God's commandments and bear testimony to Jesus. This
demonstrates, as Catholics have always believed, that Mary is the Mother of all
Christians.
Rev. 12:2 - Some Protestants argue that, because the woman
had birth pangs, she was a woman with sin. However, Revelation is apocalyptic
literature unique to the 1st century. It contains varied symbolism and multiple
meanings of the woman (Mary, the Church and Israel). The birth pangs describe
both the birth of the Church and Mary's offspring being formed in Christ. Mary
had no birth pangs in delivering her only Son Jesus.
Isaiah 66:7 - for example, we see Isaiah prophesying that
before she (Mary) was in labor she gave birth; before her pain came upon her
she was delivered of a son (Jesus). This is a Marian prophecy of the virgin
birth of Jesus Christ.
Gal 4:19 - Paul also describes his pain as birth pangs in
forming the disciples in Christ. Birth pangs describe formation in Christ.
Rom. 8:22 - also, Paul says the whole creation has been
groaning in travail before the coming of Christ. We are all undergoing birth
pangs because we are being reborn into Jesus Christ.
Jer. 13:21 - Jeremiah describes the birth pangs of Israel,
like a woman in travail. Birth pangs are usually used metaphorically in the
Scriptures.
Hos. 13:12-13 - Ephraim is also described as travailing in
childbirth for his sins. Again, birth pangs are used metaphorically.
Micah 4:9-10 - Micah also describes Jerusalem as being
seized by birth pangs like a woman in travail.
Rev. 12:13-16 - in these verses, we see that the devil still
seeks to destroy the woman even after the Savior is born. This proves Mary is a
danger to satan, even after the birth of Christ. This is because God has given
her the power to intercede for us, and we should invoke her assistance in our
spiritual lives.
III. Mary is our Mother and Queen of the New Davidic Kingdom
John 19:26 - Jesus makes Mary the Mother of us all as He
dies on the Cross by saying "behold your mother." Jesus did not say
"John, behold your mother" because he gave Mary to all of us, his
beloved disciples. All the words that Jesus spoke on Cross had a divine
purpose. Jesus was not just telling John to take care of his mother.
Rev. 12:17 - this verse proves the meaning of John 19:26.
The "woman's" (Mary's) offspring are those who follow Jesus. She is
our Mother and we are her offspring in Jesus Christ. The master plan of God's
covenant love for us is family. But we cannot be a complete family with the
Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Christ without the Motherhood of Mary.
John 2:3 - this is a very signifcant verse in Scripture. As
our mother, Mary tells all of us to do whatever Jesus tells us. Further, Mary's
intercession at the marriage feast in Cana triggers Jesus' ministry and a
foreshadowing of the Eucharistic celebration of the Lamb. This celebration
unites all believers into one famiy through the marriage of divinity and
humanity.
John 2:7 - Jesus allows His mother to intercede for the
people on His behalf, and responds to His mother's request by ordering the
servants to fill the jars with water.
Psalm 45:9 - the psalmist teaches that the Queen stands at
the right hand of God. The role of the Queen is important in God's kingdom.
Mary the Queen of heaven is at the right hand of the Son of God.
1 Kings 2:17, 20 - in the Old Testament Davidic kingdom, the
King does not refuse his mother. Jesus is the new Davidic King, and He does not
refuse the requests of his mother Mary, the Queen.
1 Kings 2:18 - in the Old Testament Davidic kingdom, the
Queen intercedes on behalf of the King's followers. She is the Queen Mother (or
"Gebirah"). Mary is our eternal Gebirah.
1 Kings 2:19 - in the Old Testament Davidic kingdom the King
bows down to his mother and she sits at his right hand. We, as children of the
New Covenant, should imitate our King and pay the same homage to Mary our
Mother. By honoring Mary, we honor our King, Jesus Christ.
1 Kings 15:13 - the Queen Mother is a powerful position in
Israel's royal monarchy. Here the Queen is removed from office. But now, the
Davidic kingdom is perfected by Jesus, and our Mother Mary is forever at His
right hand.
2 Chron. 22:10 - here Queen Mother Athalia destroys the
royal family of Judah after she sees her son, King Ahaziah, dead. The Queen
mother plays a significant role in the kingdom.
Neh. 2:6 - the Queen Mother sits beside the King. She is the
primary intercessor before the King.
IV. Mary is Ever Virgin
Exodus 13:2,12 - Jesus is sometimes referred to as the
"first-born" son of Mary. But "first-born" is a common
Jewish expression meaning the first child to open the womb. It has nothing to
do the mother having future children.
Exodus 34:20 - under the Mosaic law, the
"first-born" son had to be sanctified. "First-born" status
does not require a "second" born.
Ezek. 44:2 - Ezekiel prophesies that no man shall pass
through the gate by which the Lord entered the world. This is a prophecy of
Mary's perpetual virginity. Mary remained a virgin before, during and after the
birth of Jesus.
Mark 6:3 - Jesus was always referred to as "the"
son of Mary, not "a" son of Mary. Also "brothers" could
have theoretically been Joseph's children from a former marriage that was
dissolved by death. However, it is most likely, perhaps most certainly, that
Joseph was a virgin, just as were Jesus and Mary. As such, they embodied the
true Holy Family, fully consecrated to God.
Luke 1:31,34 - the angel tells Mary that you
"will" conceive (using the future tense). Mary responds by saying,
"How shall this be?" Mary's response demonstrates that she had taken
a vow of lifelong virginity by having no intention to have relations with a
man. If Mary did not take such a vow of lifelong virginity, her question would
make no sense at all (for we can assume she knew how a child is conceived). She
was a consecrated Temple virgin as was an acceptable custom of the times.
Luke 2:41-51 - in searching for Jesus and finding Him in the
temple, there is never any mention of other siblings.
John 7:3-4; Mark 3:21 - we see that younger
"brothers" were advising Jesus. But this would have been extremely
disrespectful for devout Jews if these were Jesus' biological brothers.
John 19:26-27 - it would have been unthinkable for Jesus to
commit the care of his mother to a friend if he had brothers.
John 19:25 - the following verses prove that James and
Joseph are Jesus' cousins and not his brothers: Mary the wife of Clopas is the
sister of the Virgin Mary.
Matt. 27:61, 28:1 - Matthew even refers to Mary the wife of
Clopas as "the other Mary."
Matt. 27:56; Mark 15:47 - Mary the wife of Clopas is the
mother of James and Joseph.
Mark 6:3 - James and Joseph are called the
"brothers" of Jesus. So James and Joseph are Jesus' cousins.
Matt. 10:3 - James is also called the son of
"Alpheus." This does not disprove that James is the son of Clopas.
The name Alpheus may be Aramaic for Clopas, or James took a Greek name like
Saul (Paul), or Mary remarried a man named Alpheus.
V. Jesus' "Brothers" (adelphoi)) = Cousins or
Kinsmen
Luke 1:36 - Elizabeth is Mary's kinswoman. Some Bibles
translate kinswoman as "cousin," but this is an improper translation
because in Hebrew and Aramaic, there is no word for "cousin."
Luke 22:32 - Jesus tells Peter to strengthen his "brethren."
In this case, we clearly see Jesus using "brethren" to refer to the
other apostles, not his biological brothers.
Acts 1:12-15 - the gathering of Jesus' "brothers"
amounts to about 120. That is a lot of "brothers." Brother means
kinsmen in Hebrew.
Acts 7:26; 11:1; 13:15,38; 15:3,23,32; 28:17,21 - these are
some of many other examples where "brethren" does not mean blood
relations.
Rom. 9:3 - Paul uses "brethren" and
"kinsmen" interchangeably. "Brothers" of Jesus does not
prove Mary had other children.
Gen. 11:26-28 - Lot is Abraham's nephew
("anepsios") / Gen. 13:8; 14:14,16 - Lot is still called Abraham's
brother (adelphos") . This proves that, although a Greek word for cousin
is "anepsios," Scripture also uses "adelphos" to describe a
cousin.
Gen. 29:15 - Laban calls Jacob is "brother" even
though Jacob is his nephew. Again, this proves that brother means kinsmen or
cousin.
Deut. 23:7; 1 Chron. 15:5-18; Jer. 34:9; Neh. 5:7
-"brethren" means kinsmen. Hebrew and Aramaic have no word for
"cousin."
2 Sam. 1:26; 1 Kings 9:13, 20:32 - here we see that
"brethren" can even be one who is unrelated (no bloodline), such as a
friend.
2 Kings 10:13-14 - King Ahaziah's 42 "brethren"
were really his kinsmen.
1 Chron. 23:21-22 - Eleazar's daughters married their
"brethren" who were really their cousins.
Neh. 4:14; 5:1,5,8,10,14 - these are more examples of
"brothers" meaning "cousins" or "kinsmen."
Tobit 5:11 - Tobit asks Azarias to identify himself and his
people, but still calls him "brother."
Amos 1: 9 - brotherhood can also mean an ally (where there
is no bloodline).
VI. Mary's Assumption into Heaven
Gen. 5:24, Heb. 11:5 - Enoch was bodily assumed into heaven
without dying. Would God do any less for Mary the Ark of the New Covenant?
2 Kings 2:11-12; 1 Mac 2:58 - Elijah was assumed into heaven
in fiery chariot. Jesus would not do any less for His Blessed Mother.
Psalm 132:8 - Arise, O Lord, and go to thy resting place,
thou and the Ark (Mary) of thy might. Both Jesus and Mary were taken up to
their eternal resting place in heaven.
2 Cor. 12:2 - Paul speaks of a man in Christ who was caught
up to the third heaven. Mary was also brought up into heaven by God.
Matt. 27:52-53 - when Jesus died and rose, the bodies of the
saints were raised. Nothing in Scripture precludes Mary's assumption into
heaven.
1 Thess. 4:17 - we shall be caught up in the clouds to meet
the Lord in the air and so we shall always be with the Lord.
Rev. 12:1 - we see Mary, the "woman," clothed with
the sun. While in Rev. 6:9 we only see the souls of the martyrs in heaven, in
Rev. 12:1 we see Mary, both body and soul.
2 Thess. 2:15 - Paul instructs us to hold fast to oral (not
just written) tradition. Apostolic tradition says Mary was assumed into heaven.
While claiming the bones of the saints was a common practice during these times
(and would have been especially important to obtain Mary's bones as she was the
Mother of God), Mary's bones were never claimed. This is because they were not
available. Mary was taken up body and soul into heaven.
VII. Mary's Coronation in Heaven
2 Tim 4:8 - Paul says that there is laid up for him the crown
of righteousness. The saints are crowned in heaven, and Mary is the greatest
saint of all.
James 1:12 - those will endure will receive the crown of
life which God has promised. Mary has received the crown of life by bringing
eternal life to the world.
1 Peter 5:4 - when the chief Shepherd is manifested we will
receive the unfading crown of glory.
Rev. 2:10 - Jesus will give the faithful unto death the
crown of life. Jesus gave Mary His Mother the crown of life.
Rev. 12:1 - Mary, the "woman," is crowned with
twelve stars. She is Queen of heaven and earth and the Mother of the Church.
Wis. 5:16 - we will receive a glorious crown and a beautiful
diadem from the hand of the Lord. Mary is with Jesus forever crowned in His
glory.
VIII. Misunderstanding about Matthew 1:25 (Joseph knew her
"not until")
Matt. 1:25 - this verse says Joseph knew her "not until
("heos", in Greek)" she bore a son. Some Protestants argue that
this proves Joseph had relations with Mary after she bore a son. This is an
erroneous reading of the text because "not until" does not mean
"did not...until after." "Heos" references the past, never
the future. Instead, "not until" she bore a son means "not up to
the point that" she bore a son. This confirms that Mary was a virgin when
she bore Jesus. Here are other texts that prove "not until" means
"not up to the point that":
Matt. 28:29 - I am with you "until the end of the
world." This does not mean Jesus is not with us after the end of the
world.
Luke 1:80 - John was in the desert "up to the point of
his manifestation to Israel." Not John "was in the desert until
after" his manifestation.
Luke 2:37 - Anna was a widow "up to the point
that" she was eighty-four years old. She was not a widow after eighty-four
years old.
Luke 20:43 - Jesus says, "take your seat at my hand
until I have made your enemies your footstool." Jesus is not going to
require the apostles to sit at His left hand after their enemies are their
footstool.
1 Tim. 4:13 - "up to the point that I come,"
attend to teaching and preaching. It does not mean do nothing "until
after" I come.
Gen. 8:7 - the raven flew back and forth "up to the
point that" [until] the waters dried from the earth. The raven did not
start flying after the waters dried.
Gen. 28:15 - the Lord won't leave Jacob "up to the
point that" he does His promise. This does not mean the Lord will leave
Jacob afterward.
Deut. 34:6 - but "up to the point of today" no one
knows Moses' burial place. This does not mean that "they did not know
place until today."
2 Sam. 6:23 - Saul's daughter Micah was childless "up
to the point" [until] her death. She was not with child after her death.
1 Macc. 5:54 - not one was slain "up to the point
that" they returned in peace. They were not slain after they returned in
peace.
IX. Misunderstanding about Romans 3:23 ("All have
sinned")
Rom. 3:23 - Some Protestants use this verse "all have
sinned" in an attempt to prove that Mary was also with sin. But "all
have sinned " only means that all are subject to original sin. Mary was
spared from original sin by God, not herself. The popular analogy is God let us
fall in the mud puddle, and cleaned us up afterward through baptism. In Mary's
case, God did not let her enter the mud puddle.
Rom. 3:23 - "all have sinned" also refers only to
those able to commit sin. This is not everyone. For example, infants, the
retarded, and the senile cannot sin.
Rom. 3:23 - finally, "all have sinned," but Jesus
must be an exception to this rule. This means that Mary can be an exception as
well. Note that the Greek word for all is "pantes."
1 Cor. 15:22 - in Adam all ("pantes") have died,
and in Christ all ("pantes") shall live. This proves that
"all" does not mean "every single one." This is because not
all have died (such as Enoch and Elijah who were taken up to heaven), and not
all will go to heaven (because Jesus said so).
Rom. 5:12 - Paul says that death spread to all
("pantes") men. Again, this proves that "all" does not mean
"every single one" because death did not spread to all men (as we
have seen with Enoch and Elijah).
Rom. 5:19 - here Paul says "many (not all) were made
sinners." Paul uses "polloi," not "pantes." Is Paul
contradicting what he said in Rom. 3:23? Of course not. Paul means that all are
subject to original sin, but not all reject God.
Rom. 3:10-11 - Protestants also use this verse to prove that
all human beings are sinful and thus Mary must be sinful. But see Psalm 14
which is the basis of the verse.
Psalm 14 - this psalm does not teach that all humans are
sinful. It only teaches that, among the wicked, all are sinful. The righteous
continue to seek God.
Psalm 53:1-3 - "there is none that does good"
expressly refers to those who have fallen away. Those who remain faithful do
good, and Jesus calls such faithful people "good."
Luke 18:19 - Jesus says, "No one is good but God
alone." But then in Matt. 12:35, Jesus also says "The good man out of
his good treasure..." So Jesus says no one is good but God, and then calls
another person good.
Rom. 9:11 - God distinguished between Jacob and Esau in the
womb, before they sinned. Mary was also distinguished from the rest of humanity
in the womb by being spared by God from original sin.
Luke 1:47 - Mary calls God her Savior. Some Protestants use
this to denigrate Mary. Why? Of course God is Mary's Savior! She was freed from
original sin in the womb (unlike us who are freed from sin outside of the
womb).
Luke 1:48 - Mary calls herself lowly. But any creature is
lowly compared to God. For example, in Matt. 11:29, even Jesus says He is lowly
in heart. Lowliness is a sign of humility, which is the greatest virtue of
holiness, because it allows us to empty ourselves and receive the grace of God
to change our sinful lives.
X. Misunderstandings about Jesus "rebuking" Mary
Matt. 12:48; Mark 3:33; Luke 8:21 - when Jesus asks,
"Who are my mother, and sisters and brothers?," some Protestants
argue that Jesus is rebuking Mary in order to denigrate her. To the contrary,
when Jesus' comments are read in light of Luke 8:5-15 and the parable of the
sower which Jesus taught right before His question, Jesus is actually implying
that Mary has already received the word as the sower of good ground and is
bearing fruit. Jesus is teaching that others must, like Mary, also receive the
word and obey it.
Matt. 12:48; Mark 3:33; Luke 8:21 - Jesus' question about
"who are my mother, and sisters and brothers" was also made in
reference to Psalm 69:8-9. Jesus the Prophet was answering the psalmist's
prophecy that those closest to Him would betray Him at His passion. Jesus is
emphasizing the spiritual family's importance over the biological family, and
the importance of being faithful to Him. While many were unfaithful to Jesus,
Mary remained faithful to Him, even to the point of standing at the foot of the
Cross.
Matt. 12:48; Mark 3:33; Luke 8:21 - finally, to argue that
Jesus rebuked Mary is to argue that Jesus violated the Torah, here, the 4th commandment.
This argument is blasphemous because it essentially says that God committed sin
by dishonoring His Mother.
Luke 11:28 - when Jesus says, "Blessed rather are those
who hear the word of God and keep it," some Protestants also call this a
rebuke of Mary. Again, to the contrary, Jesus is exalting Mary by emphasizing
her obedience to God's word as being more critical than her biological role of
mother. This affirms Luke 1:48.
Luke 11:28 - also, the Greek word for "rather" is
"menounge." Menounge really means "Yes, but in addition,"
or "Further." Thus, Jesus is saying, yes my mother is blessed indeed,
but further blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. Jesus is
encouraging others to follow Mary's example in order to build up His kingdom.
Luke 11:27-28 - finally, Jesus is the one being
complimented, not Mary. Therefore, Jesus is refocusing the attention from Him
to others who obey the word of God. If He is refocusing the attention away from
Him to others, His comment cannot be a rebuke of Mary His mother.
John 2:4 - this is another example that Protestants use to
diminish Mary's significance. Jesus' question to Mary, "what have you to
do with me?" does no such thing. To the contrary, Jesus' question
illustrates the importance of Mary's role in the kingdom. Jesus' question is in
reality an invitation to His mother to intercede on behalf of all believers and
begin His ministry, and His Mother understands this. Mary thus immediately
intercedes, Jesus obeys her, and performs the miracle which commenced His
ministry of redemption.
Luke 8:28 - the demons tell Jesus the same thing, "what
have you to do with us." The demons are not rebuking Jesus, for God would
not allow it. Instead, the demons are acknowledging the power of Jesus by their
question to Him.
John 2:4; 19:26 - when Jesus uses the title
"woman" (gnyai), it is a title of dignity and respect. It is the
equivalent of Lady or Madam. Jesus honored His Mother as God requires us to do.
NEXT, this is the text of a pamphlet that was put out
many years ago originally, but overall it covers the subject. This was authored by 2 priests who had a radio
show, one in Australia, the other in the USA.
People sent in their questions, and the priests answered
them on the air. They were Fathers
Rumble and Carty.
Bible Quizzes to A Street
Preacher
1.
1.
In a pamphlet I just read the Catholic Church is charged with
destroying the Bible.
Yes. The
Church is accused of hating the Bible, destroying the Bible, keeping the Bible
from the hands of the people, of burning it wherever and whenever she found it
and of sealing it up in the dead language of Latin which the majority of
people can neither read nor understand. And all this she does (so they
say), because she knows that her doctrines are absolutely opposed to and
contradicted by the letter of God's written Word, and that she holds to dogmas
and creeds which could not stand one gleam of the searching light of Holy
Scripture. But in reality the Bible was always available to the people
and many editions appeared before the Reformation.
2.
2.
Did not the great revolt against the Roman Church let the people see
how they had been befooled and hoodwinked?
Many believe
that putting the Bible into the hands of the people brought about the
Reformation. The multiplicity of Christian religions was brought about by
putting the Bible into the hands of the people without a proper interpreter of
what the Scriptures were saying. The Bible was in the hands of the people
long before the Reformation as you can observe through statements elsewhere in
this pamphlet.
3.
3.
Do real honest scholars believe the present-day Protestant statements
against the Church for her attitude on the Bible?
Dr. S. R. Maitland,
Protestant secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, explodes the common
opinion of the masses who believe such charges because of tradition handed down
to them from their forefathers since the "Reformation," by minister,
teacher, and parents; through sermon, catechism, newspaper, radio, fiction, and
history. They believe the tradition that monasteries and convents were
sinks of iniquity and corruption; or that Catholics pay money to have their
sins canceled, etc. The Protestant account of pre-Reformation Catholicism
has been largely a falsification of history and all the good the Church did has
been misconstrued, misjudged, misrepresented as Dr. Maitland and other students
of history admit after their study of the documentary sources. It would
be well for readers of this pamphlet to investigate and if they do they will
come to the conclusion of the story, told about Charles the Second, the Merry
Monarch of England. Charles the Second propounded to his learned and
scientific men the following profound problem: "How is it that a
dead fish weighs less than a living one?" The scholars discussed the
grave difficulty and wrote long articles to win the favor of their Royal
inquisitor, but they came to no satisfactory solution of the problem.
Finally, it occurred to one of the scientists to test whether a dead fish does
weigh less than a living one; and, of course, he discovered the lie or the
joke; for the fish weighed exactly the same, dead or living. People act
in the same gullible manner when treating statements concerning the oldest
Christian Church in the world. It would be well to investigate and you
will soon remove the mountains of abuse, calumny, and false supposition.
4.
4.
The books in our public library give testimony that your Church is
the enemy of the Bible.
By a calm
consideration of the facts of history and a mind open to conviction on genuine
Catholic and non-Catholic evidence, you will admit by sheer force of honesty
that the Catholic Church is not the enemy of the Bible for she has been the
parent, the author and maker of the Bible; she has guarded it and defended it
all through the ages against those who would destroy the Bible; she has ever
held it in esteem and has refused to allow the fallible brain of man to tamper
with the Bible; she has grounded her doctrines upon the Bible; she, of all the
Christian Churches in the world has the right to call the Bible HER OWN BOOK;
she can boast to the world that she alone possesses the true Bible and the
whole Bible of not 66 books but 73 books, and that copies of the Scriptures
outside the Church are partly incomplete and partly defective and that whatever
in them is true, is true because it comes from the Bible which the Church
preserved from the days of the Apostles who were the authors of the New
Testament.
5.
5.
We can have a Bible without a Church.
You cannot, for
common sense would tell you that what comes first is the Church and then her
writings. We must not get the cart before the horse. The Jewish
Church or Synagogue existed before Moses wrote a single line of the Old
Testament and in the like manner the Catholic Church existed before a single
line of the New Testament was written. Pentecost Day, the Birthday of
Christianity, was not the coming down of the Holy Ghost in the form of a book,
for there was no book as Johannes Jorgensen, the famous convert writer of
Stockholm, Sweden, declares. The Holy Ghost came down in the form of
tongues of fire symbolizing that Christianity was to be spread not through the
written but the spoken word. It is reasonable that Divine Providence had
the Jewish Synagogue to protect the Old Testament from mutilation and it is
logical and reasonable that the Church that gave the Bible to the world should
be set up by God to preserve and perpetuate the inspired writings of the New
Testament.
6.
6.
Was the Bible given to the world by God?
The Bible was
not served to the world all complete upon a golden platter as the Book of
Mormon is supposed to have been served to the fifteen-year-old boy, Joseph
Smith. It did not suddenly appear upon the earth through the
instrumentality of angel or seraph, but it was written by men like ourselves
who used a pen or reed and wrote on parchment in the original languages of the
Orient. They were divinely inspired, but they were human beings chosen by
God for the work.
7.
7.
Was the Bible written all at once by one man?
NO. About
1500 years elapsed between the writing of Genesis (the first book of the Old
Testament) and the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John (the last Book of the
New Testament). The word Bible comes from the Greek plural word
"biblia" which means "books". The Bible is not a
single book but a number of books written at different times by different
men. If you lived at the time Moses died all that could be given to you
of the Bible was the first five books of the Old Testament, written by Moses
himself. His writings formed the first record of the inspired Word.
8.
8.
In what language was the Bible written?
It will not be
out of place to say here that the Bible wasn't written originally in English as
so many seem to believe, judging from their arguments. Some believe that
the Scriptures were written first in English and then set forth in the
barbarous languages of Latin, Greek or Hebrew for the sake of inquisitive
scholars and critics. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New
Testament was written in Greek. The Hebrew text of the Old Testament was
translated into Greek, before the time of Christ by 70 translators.
9.
9.
When was the Old Testament compiled?
The fact that
the Old Testament was already translated into Greek more than 100 years before
Christ, indicates that the original Hebrew text existed long before that time.
10.
10. What do you
mean by the Septuagint Bible?
Because of the
"Dispersion" of the Jews and their growing familiarity with Greek
which was then the universal language, it was necessary to furnish the Jews
with a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament in the Greek language. The
first Greek translation was done by 70 translators, who worked at
Alexandria. Septuagint means 70 in Latin hence the name of that first
Greek version. Our Lord and the Apostles used this version whenever they
referred to the Scriptures. It contained the Catholic number of Old Testament
books, namely 46 and not merely 39, as found today in the Protestant
Bibles. The Septuagint version used by Christ and the Apostles was begun
about 280 years before Christ and finished in the next century. It was
the acknowledged Bible of all the "Jews of the Dispersion" in Asia,
as well as in Egypt, and it was used not only by Christ, His Apostles and
Evangelists but by Jews and Gentiles and Christians in the early days of
Christianity. It is from this list of 46 books that Christ and the New Testament
writers and speakers quote when referring to the Old Testament. Of the
350 quotations of the Old Testament found in the New Testament, 300 are taken
directly from the Greek Septuagint Bible. Pope, the Biblical scholar in
his "Aids to the Bible," i., 54, mentions 18 passages, citing Wisdom,
Ecclesiasticus and Judith books rejected by the reformers. The early
Christians of Rome were acquainted with the 7 books rejected by Protestants,
for the frescoes of the Catacombs picture Susanna and the elders as well as
Moses and Jonas. The writers of the first three centuries often quote or
allude to the books eliminated from the Protestant Version.
11.
11. What books
are not found in the Protestant Bible?
They are
Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the two Books of Machabees,
together with fragments of Esther (10:4; 16:24), and Daniel (3:24-90; 13;
14). These books were contained in the Alexandrian List or Canon of Books
which was used by the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece and
Italy.
12.
12. Well it may
be that the clergy knew the Scriptures but certainly the lay people did not.
The usual
statement is that it was a closed and sealed volume to the poor lay people,
because it was found only in the Dead Language of Latin. Dr. Maitland
declared that all civil and historical as well as religious writings were
saturated with Scripture when he says of the writers of the Middle Ages,
"They thought and spoke and wrote the thoughts and words and phrases of
the Bible . . . not exclusively in theological or ecclesiastical matters, but
in histories, biographies, familiar letters, legal instruments, and documents
of every description." How many lawyers, doctors, professors, and
lay folk of today quote the Scriptures? We have millions of copies of the
Bible and they had but the common Bible of the monastery or parish
church. The Catholic Church had to do the best she could in the
circumstances of those days before the discovery of printing and she did a
marvelous job. Vast numbers could not read and the Church was not to
blame for that. Latin was not a dead language, but the universal language
of all who could read. For those who could not read, the Church had the
medium of art, sculpture, Passion and Miracle Plays, to teach the people the
contents of Christian doctrine. The evidence brought out by the
Protestant scholar, Dr. Maitland, gives the lie to those who hold the Church
despised, hid, and dishonored the Bible.
13.
13. In your
Church doing anything to encourage Catholics to study the Bible?
The Church is
trying to get Catholics to read and study the Bible by granting them
indulgences for doing so. On a page in front of the Old Testament or else
in front of the New Testament you will find printed these words, "An
indulgence of 300 days is granted to all the faithful who read the Holy Gospels
at least a QUARTER OF AN HOUR. A plenary indulgence under the usual
conditions is granted once a month for the daily reading."
Certainly, this does not look as though the Church was striving to keep the
Bible out of the hands of the people.
14.
14. Were the
people acquainted with the Bible in the Dark Ages?
The Dark Ages
were not Dark but they were the AGES OF FAITH. Protestants in general
have the false notion that from the eighth to the fifteenth century, the
centuries were the ages of ignorance, oppression, superstition and what
not. The people were supposed to be in that period illiterate, immoral,
half civilized and constantly at war like barbarians. All this chaos of
darkness was attributed to the blighting yoke of Rome which held the masses in
ignorance of the Word of God. The light of the Reformation shone out in
this darkness and gave light and freedom to these European masses. No,
the Dark Ages were ages full of light in comparison to what 400 years of
Protestantism have brought upon the world, which has been deformed instead of
reformed.
Two centuries
from now writers can call our twentieth century the century of injustice,
misery, free love, debauchery, banditry, drunkenness, dishonesty, immorality,
unbelief, etc., compared to which the so-called Dark Ages can be termed the
Holy Ages. The Dark Ages built the gorgeous Cathedrals, and Abbeys whose
architecture has not been rivaled by any architectural genius of the twentieth
century of progress and high education. Look at the terrible contrast
between the paintings of our century and those of the Dark Ages. Are our
universities producing philosophers, thinkers of perennial thought like St.
Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, and Albertus Magnus and Scotus and
Bacon? Has this age a scholastic system that betters that of the
Schoolmen, whose method of learning and thinking is now being imitated in our
universities after years of shunting true education? An age which produced
such sociologists as Francis Xavier, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, and
a host of others could not be intellectually dark and barren of Scriptural
lore. The practical teaching the people of those reputed dark days
received from priests and monks in church and school was of far more real moral
and intellectual value than what our youth is getting today. The
mediaevalists had the knowledge of God in their souls and that is why the
Protestant scholar, Dr. Maitland, writes in such high praise of the Dark Ages.
His book on the Dark Ages will show that it is the Middle Ages which have been
a closed and sealed book to Protestants. His impartial scholarship
unlocks the treasures of those grand centuries. On page 469 in his
"Dark Ages" he writes, "The fact is . . . the writings of the
Dark Ages are, if I may use the expression, made of the Scriptures."
Another Protestant historian says, "The notion that Bible-reading was
frowned upon by ecclesiastical authorities of that age is quite unfounded."
Proof is quite abundant that the Church made ample use of the Bible in
instructing the people before the Reformation. The Mass is almost all
Scripture and at every Mass it was customary to read a portion of Scripture and
explain it to the people. The people were asked to stand in respect for
the Holy Word of God whilst the Gospel was read to them. Sermons of the
Middle Ages abound with more Scriptural quotations than are heard from the
pulpits of today. The divine office or breviary said each day by the clergy
is made up from the Bible. The Rosary was another Bible in the hands of
the people for this pious devotion taught the Catholics to meditate on the
Biblical mysteries. The fundamentals of the New Testament teaching are
meditated on when the Rosary is properly said. Before the printed Bible
came, the Church instructed people through, "Miracle and Passion
Plays." If the Church kept the Bible from the people, how explain
the intimate knowledge of the Scriptures on the part of Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare
and other Christian authors? How explain the statement of Ruskin that the
walls of St. Mark’s at Venice were the poor man's Bible? How could
Michelangelo, Murillo, Raphael and other Catholic sculptors and artists portray
on canvas and in stone such Biblical scenes if the Church kept the Bible from
the people?
15.
15. Were the
clergy of the Dark Ages ignorant of the Bible?
They had a
profound knowledge and understanding of the Bible, for Bishops and Abbots
required all their priests to know the Scriptures. In the old Constitutions
of different dioceses we find that the clergy were obliged to know the Psalms,
the Epistles, and Gospels. The Council of Toledo, 835, issued a decree
that Bishops were bound to inquire throughout their dioceses whether the clergy
were sufficiently instructed in the Scriptures. The documentary history,
as Dr. Maitland shows, proves that multitudes of ordinary priests and Bishops
had the Scriptures on their lips. Abbots caused the whole of the Old and
New Testament to be read through every year, and they had the Scriptures read
daily during meals in monasteries. Sermons of today are valueless because
they are like fishing nets without fish, whilst sermons of the reputed Dark
Ages are invaluable because they are like fishing nets overloaded with fish as
a result of their incessant Scriptural quotations. What a silly legend it
is for modern pamphleteers to be still stating that Martin Luther first
discovered by accident the Scriptures, a book which, as a monk, he was bound to
have known and studied and recited for years! No modern minister can
equal the priest of the Middle Ages in knowledge and familiarity with the
written Word of God.
16.
16. Was Martin
Luther the first one to translate the Bible into the language of the people?
No. The Bible
had been translated into Spanish, Italian, Danish, French, Norwegian, Polish,
Bohemian and Hungarian long before Martin Luther gave out his Lutheran
Bible. Seven hundred years before the birth of Luther we had an English
translation. At the end of the seventh century we have in the English
tongue the work of Caedmon, a monk of Whitby. In the next century we have
the well-known translation of Venerable Bede, a monk of Jarrow. The
Preface of the Authorized Version refers to previous translations of the
Scriptures into the language of the people and after speaking of the Greek and
Latin Versions, it says, "The Godly learned were not content to have the
Scriptures in the language which they themselves understood, Greek and Latin .
. . but also for the behoof and edifying of the unlearned which hungered and
thirsted after righteousness, and had souls to be saved as well as they.
They provided translations into the Vulgar for their countrymen, insomuch that
most nations under Heaven did shortly after their conversion hear Christ
speaking unto them in their Mother tongue, not by the voice of their minister
only but also by the written Word translated."
17.
17. When did
Luther’s Bible come out?
It came out in
1520 and before his Bible appeared there were exactly 104 editions of the Bible
in Latin; there were 9 before the birth of Luther in the German language, and
there were 27 in German before the Lutheran Bible appeared. Before the
Protestant Bible appeared there were already in Italy more than 40 editions and
25 of these were in the Italian language with the express permission of
Rome. In France there were 18 editions before 1547. Spain began her
editions in 1478. In all, 626 editions of the Bible with 198 in the
language of the laity, had been edited before the first Protestant Bible was
sent forth into the world. With all this evidence why should there be
those intellectuals who declare that the Church despised the Bible? This
testimony shows that the Church fought to preserve it, translate it, and multiply
it. She saved it from utter destruction at the hands of infidels; she
saved it from total extinction by guarding it as the greatest treasure of all
ages.
18.
18. Why did the
Church keep the Bible in Latin until the Reformation gave the people the Bible
in the vernacular?
The usual
belief is that the Church kept the Bible in Latin so that the masses could not
read it, and thereby discover the wiles of priestcraft. That nobody but
priests could read the Bible is nonsense. There were just two classes of
people in the Middle Ages: those who could read, and those who could not
read. Those who could read Latin and were perfectly content with the
Scriptures in Latin, and those who could not read Latin could not read at
all. So why should the Church prior to the spread of education in the
vernacular translate the Bible from Latin for them? Latin was then the
language of all cultured men and it was the common language of Europe.
Students heard their lectures in Latin and they talked Latin. Retreats to
nuns were preached in Latin and they understood the discourses. Hence,
Latin was not a dead language but a living one. If the Church desired to
keep the Bible from the people then why did the Church translate the Bible out
of Greek into Latin and call the Vulgate Version of the fourth century the
"Bible of the People"?
19.
19. Did the
Catholic Church burn all Bibles, and punish those who had copies?
No. The
Catholic Church would have been very stupid to have copies multiplied by her
monks and nuns only to destroy them. She did burn Bibles that were
counterfeits of the Bible, such as the Coverdale, Tyndale, and Wycliffe
Bibles. When the printing press was invented by the German Catholic
Gutenberg called in English (Gooseflesh) the first book ever printed in the
world was the Bible and that was in 1445, 80 years before Protestantism had
been heard of.
20.
20. Yet does not
the Catholic Church scoff at Bible societies as dangerous to Christianity?
She condemns
the principle that Bibles should be peddled indiscriminately to people on the
understanding that they will be able to ascertain the truth without the
guidance of the Church, and by their own unaided efforts. The wildest
fanatical religions have resulted in America from the theory of private
judgment or interpretation of Scripture, and if it is not dangerous to
Christianity to have a new pretended Christian Church arising every 10 years
from some madcap reading of an isolated text, what is really dangerous to
Christianity? The fact that 60 millions or more of Americans have no
church affiliation whatsoever today is due to madcap readings of the
Bible. In the City of Chicago recently the newspapers took an account of
all those who went to Church on Sunday within the confines of the city.
The final count showed that 85 percent of the Sunday Churchgoers went into
Catholic Churches and the remaining 15 percent went into Protestant Churches
and Jewish Synagogues. Hence, the multiplication of Bible societies
creates agnosticism, indifferentism, for truth cannot be divided.
21.
21. Does your
Church prohibit the reading of Scripture in the vernacular?
No. There
are various Catholic societies for the diffusion of the Holy Gospels in the
vernacular, such as the Society of St. Jerome, approved by the Church. In
the front of every Catholic Bible you will find that Pope Leo XIII, on December
13, 1898, granted "An indulgence of 300 days to all the faithful who read
the Holy Gospels at least a quarter of an hour. A plenary indulgence
under the usual conditions is granted once a month for the daily
reading." Well, this doesn’t look like keeping the people ignorant
of the Word of God. The following letter of His Holiness Pius VI to the
Most Rev. Anthony Martini, on his Translation of the Holy Bible into Italian,
shows the benefit which the faithful may reap from their having the Holy
Scriptures in the Vulgar Tongue, "At a time that a vast number of bad
books, which most grossly attack the Catholic Religion, are circulated, even
among the unlearned, to the great destruction of souls, you judge exceedingly
well, that the faithful should be EXCITED TO THE READING of the Holy
Scriptures; for these are the most abundant sources which ought to be left open
to everyone to draw from them purity of morals and of doctrine, to eradicate the
errors which are so widely disseminated in these corrupt times, etc."
22.
22. Then why did
Pope Clement XI, in 1713, condemn the doctrine that the Bible is for all to
read?
He did not
condemn the doctrine that it is good to read Scripture. He merely condemned
the theory that it is necessary to do so in order to know what is
Christianity. Christ's method was to establish a teaching Church, it
being necessary to be taught by that Church. He did not order the
Apostles to peddle Bibles. If the reading of Scripture were necessary to
salvation, Christ would have written a book instead of giving the commission to
His Apostles to teach, adding: "He that heareth you, heareth
me." And before the discovery of printing could Christ make the
possibility of His religion dependent upon that discovery by John
Gutenberg? How about the illiterate and the unlearned of all
history? It is absurd to make the Printed Page the Pope of
religion. Pope Clement XI wisely condemned the proposition that the reading
of Scripture is necessary to all.
23.
23. Have you a
correct translation of the Bible?
Yes. We
have one that is recognized by Protestant scholars as being a substantially
true translation. A Catholic is forbidden to read those Protestant
Versions in which there are many mistranslations and in which the text is often
distorted to suit the enemies of the Catholic Church. Counterfeit texts
are no longer the Word of God.
24.
24. You
Catholics seem afraid that Catholics will be harmed by the reading of
Scripture.
Even granted a
most perfect and correct version, thousands of people have been harmed by the
reading of Scripture, thinking themselves capable of interpreting it
aright. The Pharisees read Scripture, yet managed to use, or misuse,
quotations from the Bible as an argument against Christ, just as men today
quote Scripture as an argument against the true Church of Christ, the Catholic
Church.
25.
25. You say that
you have a Bible and that Catholics can read the Bible, but do they do so?
Some do and
some don't. All are free to do so, but it is not absolutely necessary
that they should give themselves to the private reading of Scripture.
26.
26. I know many
Catholics who have no Bible in their homes.
Catholics are
quite free to possess and read approved versions of the Bible; good Catholics
will see to it that they have in their homes the One Book given to the world by
God.
27.
27. I have known
Catholics to admit that they have never read the Bible, so why doesn’t the
Catholic Church teach it to them?
The doctrines
of the Bible are taught to her people by the Catholic Church more faithfully
than by any other Church on earth. The Bible tells us that Christ is God
and this, Protestant ministers in growing numbers deny. The Bible tells
us that Christ established a living, visible Church and this Protestants
deny. The Bible tells us that the consecrated bread and wine is the true
Body and Blood of our Lord and this Protestants deny. The Bible tells us
that Christ's ministers of reconciliation have the power to forgive sins and
this Protestants refuse to believe. The Bible condemns divorce even in
the case of adultery and this Protestants by practice consider as
nonsense. Catholics know more fundamental doctrine than the man who,
parrot-like, can quote the Bible. Knowledge of text is not knowledge of
doctrine. Some Catholics do not read the Bible very much, but they know
the doctrines taught by the Bible more clearly than any other Christian people
on earth. A Catholic may be at a loss when you quote some particular text,
but he knows clearly what must be done to save one's soul and he knows all that
Christ condemns; namely, divorce, birth prevention, mercy killings,
sterilization, prohibition, the injustices of Capital and Labor, etc.
28.
28. You must
admit that Protestants love the Scriptures more than Catholics.
How can they
when they slaughter all the doctrines taught by Christ?
29.
29. Protestants
have a true copy of the Bible.
How can they
when they cut out seven books from the Old Testament; namely, Tobias, Judith,
Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, the two Books of Machabees, and the various sections of
other Books. They have many errors in their supposedly true copy of the
Bible.
30.
30. Do you
accuse the Protestant translators of grossly infamous conduct in tampering with
the text?
I absolutely
do. Dixon, in his "Introduction to Scripture" says, "That
the early Protestant translations were full of gross errors no unprejudiced
Protestant will now deny, and that these errors were willful, Ward, in his
‘Errata,’ satisfactorily proves." Blunt, in his "Key to the
Knowledge and Use of the Bible" says, "The characters of the
translators were not such as to command the respect of men." Robert
Gell writes that "Truth was often outvoted. Dogmatic interests were
in some cases allowed to bias the translation. The Calvinism of one
party, the prelatic views of another, were both represented at the expense of
accuracy."
31.
31. Is not the
Douay Version poorer in English than the Protestant Version?
The Douay
Version is not a version deliberately accommodated to Catholic teaching.
It is a substantially true Version which, because true, necessarily indicates
the Catholic Church as the true Church. For that is the truth of
Scripture. From a literary point of view, it is a less beautiful
translation than that of the Authorized Version, because it is a more exact
translation. When a foreign language, classical or modem, is translated
into English, the more one clings to the text, the less purely literary beauty
one attains in the new language. To obtain a more beautiful rendering one
must translate more freely, thus more or less forfeiting the exact sense of the
original. But in the matter of God's Word, we want, not so much literary
beauty, but just what God intended. And for that, the Douay Version far
surpasses the Authorized Version, despite its rather awkward literary structure
at times.
32.
32. It is much
better to have the Bible out of the hands of Rome.
Henry VIII
himself will answer that for you in his last pathetic speech to Parliament:
"I am extremely sorry to find how much the Word of God is abused; with how
little reverence it is mentioned; how it is turned into wretched rhymes, sung
and jangled in every ale house and tavern; and all this in a false construction
and countermeaning to the inspired writers. I am sorry to perceive the
readers of the Bible discover so little of it in their practice; for I am sure
charity was never in a more languishing condition, virtue never at a lower ebb,
nor God Himself less honored or worse served in Christendom." Due to
taking the Bible out of the hands of Rome by the end of the sixteenth century
we find 270 sects and because of this, Dr. Walton writes in the Preface to his
own Polyglot Bible, "There is no fanatic or clown from the lowest dregs of
the people who does not give you his own dreams as the Word of God. For
the bottomless pit seems to have been set open from whence a smoke has risen
which has obscured the heavens and the stars, and locusts are come out with
wings - a numerous race of sectarians and heretics, who have renewed all the
old heresies, and invented monstrous opinions of their own. These have
filled our cities, villages, camps, houses - nay, our churches and pulpits,
too, and lead the poor deluded people with them to the pit of perdition."
33.
33. Is not the
Catholic Church arrogant in claiming the Bible as her own?
The Bible is her
book and you cannot disprove it. She has preserved it and she alone
knows what it means. No one else has any right to it whatsoever, or any
authority to declare what the texts mean. The work of translating it, of
printing it, and editing it, belongs strictly to her alone and if she cannot
prevent those outside her jurisdiction from tampering with it and misusing it
then she will take care that her own children must avoid perusal of counterfeit
Bibles. History shows that the Church has been wise in prohibiting
private persons from translating the Bible without ecclesiastical
authority. For instance, look at what Judge Rutherford has done with the
Bible. The Church is very wise in prohibiting the faithful from reading
Bibles that are not approved by her, for she desires that the pure, uncorrupted
Gospel should be placed into the hands of the people. Mr. Allnatt (in his
"Bible and the Reformation") says, "That all the early
Protestant versions of the Bible literally swarmed with gross and flagrant
corruptions — corruptions consisting in the willful and deliberate
mistranslation of various passages of the sacred text, and all directly aimed
against those doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church which the
‘Reformers’ were most anxious to uproot. They did give the people an
‘Open Bible,’ but what a Bible." Hence, to hate the Bible is one
thing, and to prohibit a false version like the notorious Wycliffe, Tyndale and
Coverdale Bibles is quite another.
34.
34. The Bible,
and the Bible alone, is enough for me.
Which
Bible? Have you the right Bible? Are you certain that your Bible
contains all and only the true words that came down from the hands of Apostles
and Evangelists? Are you positive that no other word has been inserted by
man or dropped out deliberately by man? Have you an exact copy of the
Holy Scriptures identical with the writings from Moses to St. John? If
you haven't then why talk about the Bible and the Bible alone theory? How
do you know the Bible came from God? Do you prove it by the intrinsic
merit of the writings or do you rely upon the religious quality of the
Scriptures as sufficient evidence? The intrinsic merit of the Bible and
the inspiration it gives the reader is no argument that it has God as the
author for we have other books as, for instance, "The Following of
Christ," which is much more inspiring than some parts of the Bible.
We know that the Bible is the Word of God, because the Catholic Church that
gave the Bible to the world says so. You, to believe in the Bible, must
admit some third party to come between you and God. The Catholic has as
his third party, the Catholic Church which comes between him and God to tell
him what's what about the Bible.
35.
35. The Lord’s
Prayer or the Our Father is in the Bible, but the Catholic prayer differs from
the Protestant.
Protestants use
a conclusion which was not in the original Greek copies of the New Testament,
namely, "For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory,
forever. Amen." Catholics say the Lord’s Prayer properly, for
the Protestant conclusion taken from the King James Version is a marginal
gloss, put in there by some copyist, who had in mind words borrowed from the
Greek liturgy. They were rejected as not authentic by St. Jerome in the
fourth century, as they have been rejected by the authors of the Revised
Version of 1881. Some versions put these words today in
parentheses. Even the King James Version omits this gloss in Luke 11:
4. Such an addition was not uttered by Our Lord and that is why Catholics
do not use it. This is an excellent example of how errors occur in the
various copies made by old scribes. Pious Bible students may hold up
their hands in horror and cry out, "There are no mistakes in the
Bible. It is all inspired. It is God's own Book."
Yes. But God never guaranteed that every individual scribe who took in
hand the copying of the New Testament would never copy wrongly. The original
Scripture is free from error because God is the author of the original.
36.
36. Are any of
the original writings of Moses or Paul, or John in existence today?
No. None
of the originals exist today, but we know from history and tradition that these
were the books they wrote. What we have now is the printed Bible; but
before the invention of printing in 1438, the Bible existed only in handwriting
or manuscript form. We have in our possession now copies of the Bible in
manuscript which date back as early as the fourth century. We have not
the originals but copies of the originals for several reasons: (1) The
persecutors of the Church for the first 300 years destroyed everything
Christian they could lay their hands on. (2) The material upon which the
inspired writers wrote was papyrus, a frail, brittle, perishable, substance not
destined to last long. (3) When copies were made of the originals for the
various Churches there was not the same necessity for preserving the
originals. The early Christians certainly did not consider it necessary
for salvation that the very handwriting of St. Paul, etc., should be
preserved. Since they had the living, infallible Church to teach and
guide them, they were content with mere COPIES of the original works of the authors.
Manuscript or handwritten copies of the Bible known to be in existence number
about 3,000 today. None have yet been found earlier than the fourth
century.
37.
37. Why did
Luther reject 7 books from the Bible?
Because they
did not suit his new doctrines. He had arrived at the principle of
private judgment-of picking and choosing religious doctrines; and whenever any
book, such as the Book of Machabees, taught a doctrine contrary to his taste he
rejected it overboard and overboard that book went because it says: 2
Mach. 12:46, "it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that
they may be loosed from sins." He not only cast out certain books,
but he mutilated some that were left. For example, not pleased with St.
Paul's doctrine, "we are justified by faith," Luther added the word
"ALONE" to make the sentence read: "We are justified by
faith alone." His explanation of this insertion is found in his own
words, "I know very well that the word ‘alone’ is not in the Latin and
Greek texts; but Dr. Martin Luther will have it so, and I order it to be so,
and my will is reason enough." St. Paul writes under the inspiration
of the Holy Ghost. Luther creates a Lutheran Bible under his own
audacity. He shows little respect for the Bible when he calls the Epistle
of St. James "an Epistle of straw with no character of the Gospel in
it." He spoke disparagingly about the Epistle of St. Jude, the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and the beautiful Apocalypse of St. John.
38.
38. Were there
other writings besides the New Testament esteemed as Scripture?
Before 397 A.
D. there were 3 classes of sacred writings being read in the Churches.
First, there were the genuine writings accepted universally by the Christian
Church which hailed this first group of writings as actually written by the
Apostles whose names they bore. The second class of sacred writings,
which were being used by the Churches, was the disputed class. In some
places they were accepted as genuine Scripture and in other places they were not
so accepted. In this second class, or disputed list, were St. James, St.
Jude, the second Epistle of St. Peter, the second and third Epistle of St.
John, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation
(Apocalypse). Then there was a third class of writings spread about,
which was never accepted by any of the Churches as genuine Scripture, books
which contained all sorts of fanciful stories or fables of the early life of
Our Lord. In 397, the Catholic Church gave a definite decision as to
which should be admitted into the Bible and which should be rejected, and every
book which is in the Protestant New Testament today, was put there by Pope
Siricius and the Catholic Bishops in the year 397 A. D. If Christ had
intended that men should learn Christianity from the New Testament, what about
the hundreds who lived before the first Bible was given to the world by the
Catholic Church?
39.
39. You seem to
undervalue the written Word of God.
No. I am
simply showing the position it was meant to occupy in the Christian Church.
It was written by the Church; it belongs to the Church and it is her
prerogative to declare what it means. It is intended for enlightenment,
meditation, spiritual reading, encouragement, exhortation, devotion, and it
also gives testimony of the Church’s doctrines. It is not a complete
guide to heaven.
40.
40. Is the Old
Testament a civil and political history of the Jews?
No. It is
their history as the Chosen People of God, chosen as the receivers and carriers
of His progressive Revelation through Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and the
Prophets. The Old and New Testaments can be called a great work of UNITY,
since the Old Testament looks forward to the one central figure, the Messiah,
Jesus Christ and the New Testament looks back to that Messiah.
41.
41. Didn’t the
Apostles intend to make the New Testament a compendium of Christian doctrine?
The books of
the New Testament were produced as a result of special circumstances that arose
among the converts. They were written to meet the particular demands and
emergencies of the time. The authors never dreamed of writing the New
Testament or composing works which would one day be taken as the sole rule of
religion. The Apostles would stand dazed if told that what they wrote
would one day be held up as the complete and exhaustive statement of Christian
doctrines. No writings were ever intended to be used as an easy guide in
faith and morals, independent of any living and teaching authority to interpret
them. St. Paul himself says, "How shall they hear without a
preacher? How shall they preach unless they be sent? Faith cometh
by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ." When the Apostles
speak they claim to speak with Divine authority and they nowhere claim to be
laying down a system of Christian doctrine. Their teaching was at first
ORAL, and it was no part of their intention to create a permanent
literature. They wrote to believers, not to unbelievers. The Church
existed and functioned before they wrote anything. Before a line in the
New Testament was written (1) Christ established His Church; (2) the Apostles
preached Christ’s Gospel; (3) St. Peter converted 3,000 Jews; (4) Council of
Jerusalem was assembled; (5) Jewish ceremonial law was abrogated.
Before the last
book in the New Testament was written (1) the Catholic Church celebrated her
golden jubilee; (2) 11 of the Apostles had died.
Hence, THE
BIBLE CAME FROM THE CHURCH. THE CHURCH DID NOT COME FROM THE BIBLE.
Christianity existed over 300 years without one single Bible Christian.
42.
42. Did Jesus
Christ write any of the New Testament?
Our Blessed
Lord Himself never, so far as we know, wrote a line of Scripture. He
never told His Apostles to write anything, and He certainly did not command
them to commit to writing what He had revealed to them. He never said,
"Go and write," but He did say, "Go ye and teach all
nations," "Preach the Gospel to every creature," "He that
heareth you heareth Me." He, therefore, commanded them to do just
what He was doing; namely, delivering the Word of God to the people by the
living voice - by which they were to convince, persuade, instruct, and
convert. Faith was to be won by hearing, not by reading. Christ did
not entrust His message to a dead book which might perish and be destroyed,
mutilated, counterfeited, misinterpreted by man.
The very action
of Christ proves that the Word of God was to be preserved by a Living Tradition
and not by a Written Message.
43.
43. What is the
Protestant and Catholic position on the Bible?
The Protestant,
believing in Christ, holds that He left no authoritatively teaching Church, but
only the Bible, which each individual may read and interpret for himself on the
principle of "private judgment." All churches are manmade.
No one of them was founded by Christ. The Catholic, believing in Christ,
holds that He founded an authoritative Church which has the right to guide all
her members in matters of faith and morals. The Catholic believes the
Church is infallible and cannot make a mistake or teach error. The
Catholic goes to the Church as his immediate Guide and Teacher. The
Catholic believes in the Bible and Tradition, whilst the Protestant believes in
the Bible alone.
44.
44. What is the
difference between the Hebrew, Protestant, and Catholic Bibles?
The Hebrew
Bible contains only books of the Old Testament, since the orthodox, reformed,
or liberal Jew does not accept our Lord as the Messiah. The Palestinian
Jews had 39 books in the Old Testament and the Alexandrian Jews and the Jews of
Dispersion had 46 books in their Bible. The Protestant Bible contains in
the Old Testament, 39 books of the Palestinian Jews and the 27 books of the New
Testament, 66 books in all. The Catholic Bible contains 46 books of the
Alexandrian Canon or list of Old Testament books and the 27 books of the New
Testament, 73 books in all.
45.
45. Besides the
difference of numbers of books is there any other difference between Catholic
and Protestant Bibles?
Serious
difference is in the accuracy of translation. Protestant preachers and
Bishops have written volumes to point out the errors in the King James Version
and the Revised Version. In a convention of ministers at St. Louis, Mo.,
some years ago, a Presbyterian minister urged the necessity of a new
translation of the Protestant Bible and held that there were no less than
30,000 errors. Another difference is the titles of books:
"Canticle of Canticles" for "Solomon's Song,"
"Apocalypse" for "Book of Revelation . . . . . First and Second
Kings," for "First and Second Samuel," etc.
46.
46. Why are the
names in the Protestant Bible spelled differently from those in the Catholic
Bible?
The Protestant
version has, for instance, Nebuchadnezzar, the Catholic Nabuchodonosor.
The Protestant forms follow the Hebrew, the vocalized text of which was fixed
by the Massoretes between the fifth and seventh centuries after Christ; the
Catholic forms follow the Greek which was fixed about the second century before
Christ. The Catholic spelling has been in some cases confirmed by archeological
discoveries.
47.
47. You say the
Church came before the Bible.
YES. The
books of the New Testament were scattered around the Mediterranean civilization
for 300 years before the writings were gathered up and compiled into one
collection. It is a fact of history that the Council of Carthage (397 A.
D. ) settled the Canon Table of Contents of the New Testament as we Catholics
have them today.
48.
48. Was there
ever a collection of the Scriptures before 397?
We find lists
of books of the New Testament drawn up by St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, St.
Augustine, and many other authorities, but their lists do not correspond
perfectly to the collection we possess now. It was the Council of
Carthage (397 A.D.) that settled all doubts on the canon or list of books which
all Christendom had until the Reformers changed that list. If other lists
of books existed before 397, then the action of the Council of Carthage teaches
the world that the Catholic Church selected, sifted, and stamped with her
authority the Scriptures of the New Law. It is through the Catholic
Church that Protestants get their Bible. Imagine what standing
Protestantism would have if the Catholic Church were indeed the enemy of the
Bible and had destroyed all manuscripts in the days of the infant Church.
49.
49. What do you
mean by Inspiration of the Bible? Does God act as the author of every
word written?
Inspiration
means the fact that God as the author of each and every book of the Bible did
not take away from Moses, David, Isaias, the Apostles, etc., anything at all
except the power to write something God did not want them to write.
Moses, for instance, could not write what God did not want him to write or in a
way God did not want him to write. His writing was controlled by God, yet
it still left him a free human agent and author. God allowed freedom of
style to each writer, but God was responsible for each and everything the
writer wrote. God may inspire the very words they use, but this is not
essential to the motion of inspiration. We may hold, for example, that
Moses is the author of the first 5 books of the Bible, but the Biblical
Commission tells us that we are not bound to believe that Moses wrote or
dictated everything himself. Writing under inspiration he may have
"committed it to one or more to write, yet in such a way that they should
faithfully express his meaning, write nothing or omit nothing against his will,
and that the work. . . approved by Moses, the chief inspired author, should be
published in his name."
50.
50. What do you
mean by the Vulgate Edition?
Translations of
the Bible were made into Latin, Armenian, Syriac and Coptic, Arabic and
Ethiopic for the benefit of Christians in these lands. Latin first
appeared in 150 A. D. and other translations into Latin later. The best
and grandest Latin version was made by St. Jerome and this was called the
"Vulgate" - that is, the common, or current or accepted
version. St. Jerome, who was a monk, and the most learned scholar of his
day, at the request of Pope St. Damasus in 382 A. D. made his fresh Latin
translations correcting the existing Latin versions with the Greek manuscripts
he could find.
51.
51. Is the
Vulgate the official version of your Church?
St. Jerome's
Latin Vulgate is the official text in the Catholic Church, and all Protestant
and Catholic scholars admit it to be the best down to the Reformation.
The Council of Trent, in 1546, issued a decree, stamping it as the only
recognized and authoritative version allowed to Catholics. The English
Douay Version comes from the Vulgate.
52.
52. The Bible
was not printed in any language until 1500 years after the birth of Christ.
How could it
when there was no such thing as printing? What would happen to the
Protestant principle "the Bible and the Bible alone," if printing
were never discovered? If we lived before Mr. John Gutenberg discovered
the art of printing in the fifteenth century we should have to read manuscripts
of some monk or nun who wrote out a copy of the Bible on pages of parchment or
vellum. Are we to convert the world by peddling printed Bibles to the
heathen and unconverted sinners? How about those who lived before the
Bible was printed? How were nations made familiar with Christianity
before the discovery of printing? Christ desired to save those who lived
before printing was discovered as well as those who lived after its
discovery. If the reading of the Bible is the only medium of salvation,
how about those who cannot read and those who are too poor to buy one?
THE BLUNDERING
BLUNDER OF ALL HISTORY is that people fail to understand that for the first 300
years of Christianity there was not one single BIBLE CHRISTIAN in the world and
that they do not sufficiently realize, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest
the fact that the Bible was not multiplied in printed copies until 1,400 years
after Christ.
53.
53. Do all
ministers believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God?
No.
Professor G. H. Betts, of the Northwestern University, not long ago sent out a list
of 56 questions on religion and theology to 1,309 Protestant ministers then in
active service, and to 5 Protestant theological seminaries. Between 700
and 800 ministers replied, and also a large number of students in the 5
seminaries. Here are the results concerning the Bible as published by
Prof. Betts, himself a Protestant, 2 percent of the Lutheran ministers, 38
percent of the Baptist ministers, 56 percent of the Presbyterian ministers, 60
percent of the Episcopalian ministers, 65 percent of the Methodist ministers,
83 percent of the Congregational ministers, and 92 percent of the students
denied or doubted the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. In view of
this astounding revelation we see who, indeed, is the enemy of the Bible.
54.
54. Protestant
sects claim to be founded on the Bible, and the Bible alone. THEN WHY IS
IT THAT WE HAVE SO MANY OF THEM?
It is just
because there are so many different interpretations as to what the Bible
means. It is the sad result of the doctrine of the right of private
judgment. Every Protestant denomination claims to be founded on the
Scriptures. Then how can they all be right? Is the Methodist right,
or the Lutheran, or the Baptist or the Episcopalian? They can't be right
for they all differ in doctrine and government. If they do not differ,
then why are they separated? Protestantism says, "Let each one read
the Bible for himself and then the Holy Ghost will guide him into the
truth." Well, then the Holy Ghost must be blamed for the Babylon of
religions around us. If the Holy Ghost guides one man he becomes a
Baptist, if he guides another he becomes something else and so on until people
give up religion entirely. The Holy Ghost inspires no one using his own
private interpretation. The Holy Ghost was guaranteed to the Church and
not to individuals in the teaching of truth.
By way of
analogy, suppose our Constitution of the United States could be termed our
Bible of Democracy. Just think what confusion would happen if every Tom,
Dick, and Harry using the right of private judgment interpreted the laws of our
nation as he felt himself inspired by the Holy Ghost. See what would soon
happen to our 48 states if we didn't have the Supreme Court to tell us what the
Constitution is saying. Without the Supreme Court our nation would come
to an end as a democracy if we tolerated in government the absurd and
fallacious principle of private judgment. As we must maintain a Supreme
Court in government is it not all the more rational and reasonable that we have
a Supreme Authority to interpret the Bible, our Constitution of Christianity,
to avoid religious confusion? The proper authority to interpret the Bible
is the Supreme Court of the Catholic Church, which gave the Bible to the world.
55.
55. Was Luther
responsible for the private judgment theory?
Yes. It
was inaugurated by him and shortly after, when he saw the numerous sects
growing and multiplying, he said in his Epis. ad. Zwingli (ap. Balmes, p. 423),
"If the world lasts for a long time, it will again be necessary, on
account of the many interpretations which are now given to the Scriptures, to
receive the decrees of councils, and take refuge in them, in order to preserve
the unity of faith."
56.
56. Did Luther
ever acknowledge the danger of private judgment?
He says this,
as quoted in "An Meine Kritiker" (by Johannes Jorgensen, p. 181),
"There are almost as many sects and beliefs as there are heads; this one
will not admit Baptism; that one rejects the Sacrament of the altar; another
places another world between the present one and the day of judgment; some
teach that Jesus Christ is not God. There is not an individual, however
clownish he may be, who does not claim to be inspired by the Holy Ghost, and
who does not put forth as prophecies his ravings and dreams." We
have over 60 millions of Americans quite indifferent to the doctrines of their
Protestant ancestors precisely because -- "In Religion, What damned error,
but some sober-brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text?"
57.
57. Some books
speak of 72 books and others speak of 73 books in the Catholic Bible.
Some editors
unite the Prophecies of Jeremias with the Lamentations of Jeremias and make one
book out of both, thereby accounting for 72 books, and other editors separate
Jeremias and Lamentations entirely into two books making thereby 73 books.
58.
58. Where do you
get the statement that Luther discovered the Bible?
In the Lutheran
World Almanac and Annual Encyclopedia for 1923, you will find the hoary
falsehood running thus: The "incomparable Luther" gave to the
world "The Open Bible. . ." "In the university he
discovered a chained Latin Bible," the study of which "brought him
the peace of mind which he craved the assurance of justification and of
salvation by faith alone, without the works of the law. . ." That
there was a "chained" Latin Bible in the university is very
likely. Even today public telephone books are chained for the purpose of
keeping them in their proper place. Bibles were chained down to the
pulpit, rostrum or monastery table, for there were thieves in those days as
there are thieves today. The Church chained the Bible not to keep the
Bible from but for the people. A Bible in those days, declares the
Protestant scholar, Dr. Maitland, would cost anywhere from $1,000 up, because
it was a manuscript copy made on costly parchment or vellum. You will
find Bibles still chained down today in churches on the continent of the Old
World, in monasteries, and twentieth century museums for obvious reasons.
That Luther had access to the Bible in his youth is attested by himself in his
"Table Talks" (ed. 1566, p. 22). "When I was young, I
acquainted myself with the Bible, read the same often, so that I knew where any
reference was contained and could be found when anyone spoke about it."
59.
59. The Gospel
of Christ is simplicity itself.
In one way it
is. It tells us clearly that Christ established a definite Church which
He commissioned to teach all nations. It is very simple from this point
of view, for men have but to accept the Catholic Church, and be taught by that
Church. But the Gospel is not simplicity itself in the way you
intend. Men have devoted their lives to the study of the Gospels,
preparing themselves for the task by profound research in the Hebrew, Syrian,
Arabic, Greek, and Latin languages. And even then, many passages are most
difficult to understand.
60.
60. But at least
the plan of salvation can he understood by the simplest person. We
Protestants even tell our children to read their Bibles in order to discern it.
According to
the findings of your simple readers there must be hundreds of conflicting plans
of salvation, all revealed by the one Christ. As for the capacity of your
children, you might as well give them the article in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica on "Spectroscopic Analysis" as the subject matter of their
studies. But the Bible itself is against your theory. Thus, St.
Peter says that in Scripture there are certain things "hard to be
understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other
Scriptures, to their own destruction." 2 Pet. 3:16. To his
mind the private interpretation of Scripture can be most dangerous.
61.
61. God has
given us brains to think for ourselves. We do not need help to understand
Scripture.
God had given
men brains before He came to teach them Himself, and He came to teach them
precisely because their brains could not succeed in finding out the things
which were to their peace. If you say that His revealed teachings in the
Scriptures together with our brains are enough, those very revealed teachings
tell you that they are not. Even in the Old Law, God said, "The lips
of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his
mouth." Mal. 2:7. In the New Law, Christ sent His Church to
teach men, transferring to His Church that authority of God once possessed by
the priests of the Old Law. In the New Testament itself, we find Philip
the Deacon saying to the Ethiopian, who was reading the Scriptures,
"Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?" and the
Ethiopian replying, "And how can I unless some man show me?"
Acts 8:30. St. Peter, too, explicitly refutes your ideas. "No
prophecy of Scripture," he writes, "is of any private
interpretation." 2Pet. 1:20.
62.
62. St. Peter
means that the prophets did not prophesy by their own will, but by the Holy
Spirit. He does not refer to interpretation by us.
Your own
Protestant Bishop Ellicott says of these verses. "The words ‘private
interpretation’ might seem to mean that the sacred writers did not get their
prophecies by private interpretation, but by divine inspiration. But this
is certainly not the meaning. The real meaning is that the reader must
not presume to interpret privately that which is far more than ordinary human
thought."
63.
63. Any man who can
think has the moral right to interpret anything.
He has
not. The very laws of the state are not subject to the interpretation of
each and every citizen. There is such a thing as thinking
erroneously. In difficulties of civil law a man consults a lawyer who
knows legal practice and parallel statutes. Who gives you the right to
take greater liberties with divine legislation? A man who knows nothing
of Hebrew or Greek, and is quite untrained in Scriptural exegesis, would
misapprehend the sense of Scripture in hundreds of places.
64.
64. Did not
Christ promise that He would send the Holy Spirit to teach us all truth?
He did not
promise that the Holy Spirit would teach each individual separately. If
every individual were under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, all who read
Scripture sincerely should come to the same conclusion. But they do
not. The frightful chaos as to the meaning of Scripture is proof positive
that the Holy Spirit has not chosen this way of leading men to the truth.
It is blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit does not know His own mind, and
that He deliberately leads men into contradictory notions. Christ
promised to preserve His church as a Church by the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
and the only Church which shows signs of having been preserved is the
consistent Catholic Church. The individual is guided by the Holy Spirit
to a certain extent in the ways of holiness, but in the knowledge of revealed
truth he is to be guided by the Catholic Church which Christ sent to teach all nations.
65.
65. I don't see
the need of learning to understand a simple story for simple people.
The Bible is
not a simple story for simple people. We live thousands of years after
the Bible was written, and our language and customs are very different
now. No book written at one age is easy for another age. The study
of antiquities demands a knowledge of primitive languages of which few are
capable, and for which still fewer have the time. Anyway, God never
intended the Bible to be the sole guide to religion for all time. Christ
taught orally and with authority, and He sent His Church to teach in the same
way and with the same authority.
66.
66. How does it
help to know Hebrew or Greek?
Because one
must know what the original words meant in the language in which Scripture was
written. A knowledge of Hebrew and Greek soon shows that the translators do not
always find an English word to express the exact sense of the original.
God inspired the thoughts of the original writers, not the work of the
translators. And if you read a sense into Scripture which God did not
intend at all, you no longer have God's Word.
67.
67. Christ chose
poor fishermen, not learned men.
He trained them
personally, and infused into their minds an exact knowledge of His
doctrine. We cannot claim to have received a similar revelation, that we
should rank ourselves with them.
68.
68. Then
Catholics have to believe just what the priest likes to tell them?
The priest cannot
tell the people just what he likes. He is obliged to teach just what
Christ taught, and which has been taught him in the Name of Christ by the
infallible Catholic Church.
69.
69. Is your
Church afraid that people will form opinions for themselves?
If we consider
some of the opinions people have formed for themselves from their private
reading of Scripture there is need to be afraid. Christ's method was to
establish a teaching Church. Protestants have a peculiar method of their
own, but you cannot blame the Catholic Church for not using the Protestant
method, a method which has led to nothing but uncertainty and widespread
unbelief.
70.
70. Admitting
the necessity of guidance, are not our Protestant ministers as capable as
Catholic priests in telling us what Scripture means?
They might be,
if priests had not an infallible Catholic Church to guide them. The
Catholic Church rejoices in the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, and the
priest has the help of her defined doctrines and the constant Catholic tradition
as a safeguard. But your Protestant ministers do not claim to be
spokesmen of an infallible Church. On their own principles they have to
admit that they are possibly wrong. And, as a matter of fact, where all
priests are agreed in the essential teachings of Scripture, your ministers come
to all kinds of contradictory conclusions. The unity of teaching among
Catholic priests is a greater indication of capability than the chaos which
prevails outside the Catholic Church. But the capability of Catholic
priests has little to do with authoritative teaching. It is derived from
the authority of the infallible Catholic Church.
71.
71. You speak of
the authority of the Church and the weight of tradition. But I have been
taught that Scripture is the only rule of faith.
You have been
taught wrongly. Scripture itself denies that it is the only rule of
faith. The last verse of St. John's Gospel tells us that not all
concerning our Lord’s work is contained in Scripture. St. Paul tells us
over and over again that many might be able to cite hundreds of texts yet not
know Christian doctrine by any means. In fact, the adoption of the Bible
only has led to as many opinions as there are men-amongst non-Catholics.
Finally, Scripture tells us most clearly that the Catholic Church is the rule
of faith, that Church which Christ sent to teach all nations and which He
commanded men to hear and obey. He who believes in Scripture as his only
guide ends by believing in his own mistaken interpretations of the Bible, and
that means that he ends by believing in himself
72.
72. Is not the
Church built on the knowledge it gets from the Bible?
No. The
Catholic Church was built by Christ and upon Christ before a line of the New
Testament was written. She received her doctrine immediately from the
lips of Christ, and is safeguarded from error in her teaching by the Holy
Spirit. Between 40 and 80 years after her foundation, some of her members
wrote the books of the New Testament. If the Gospels were the only rule
of faith, then before they were written there could have been no Christian rule
of faith at all!
73.
73. Christ gave
us the command to search the Scriptures. Jn. 5:39.
That was a
retort, not a command, and you cannot turn a particular rebuke into a universal
law. Were it a universal law, it would have been impossible of
fulfillment by the vast majority during the 14 centuries prior to the invention
of the printing press! But take the context. The Jews, who boasted
of their fidelity to the Mosaic Law, would not believe in Christ. He
challenged them: "(you) search the Scriptures, for you think in them
to have life everlasting; and the same are they that give testimony of
me." The Catholic Church could say in the same way to Protestants:
"You are ever speaking of searching the Scriptures as opposed to my
methods, and think in them to have everlasting life independently of me; yet
the same are they that give testimony of me."
74.
74. Do we not
read that the early Christians searched the Scriptures daily? Acts 17:11
They first
received the true doctrine from the teaching Church, and then merely checked it
in the Scriptures. That is the right procedure, and Catholics today do
the same. But your way is not first to be taught by the Church, and then
verify, but to try to make out your own religion from the Bible with an
untrained mind and by that private interpretation which Scripture itself
forbids.
75.
75. Well, I am
afraid of nothing as long as I have the pure Word of God to fall back upon.
Without the
Catholic Church you cannot prove it to be the pure Word of God. Nor need
anyone be afraid of the pure Word of God. What we must fear is the Word
of God adulterated by people who read into it whatever they like.
76.
76. I object to
the way you put human traditions on the same level as Scripture.
As a source of
doctrine the Catholic Church relies upon divinely guaranteed tradition, not
upon merely human tradition. This divine tradition is the teaching of
Christ, given orally to the Apostles and handed down in the Church, although
not written in the pages of the New Testament.
77.
77. Then you
appeal to tradition in addition to Scripture?
Yes, and I am
quite Biblical in doing so. Christ sent the Apostles to teach all things
that He had taught them. In the last verse of his Gospel, St. John tells
us that not all is written in Scripture. If all is to be taught, and all
is not set down in Scripture, part of Christian doctrine must be
elsewhere. Where? St. Paul tells us clearly, "Brethren, stand
fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by
our Epistle." 2 Thess. 2:14. "Hold the form of sound
words which you have heard of me in faith." 2 Tim. 1:13. "The
things thou hast heard of me by many witnesses, the same commend to faithful
men, who shall be fit to teach others also." 2 Tim. 2:2. All
Christians from the very beginning believed that Christian revelation was
contained not only in Scripture, but also in tradition. Acts 2:42, tells
us that "they were persevering in the doctrine of the Apostles," that
is, in the oral teaching of the Apostles which they taught to one another, and
handed on to their children. Those who repudiate tradition have lost the
complete doctrine of Christ.
78.
78. I do not
question traditions contained in Scripture. I object to the Roman
traditions which are not in Scripture and which are against Scripture.
The Catholic
Church rejects all traditions which are against Scripture. She accepts
divine traditions which are complementary to Scripture, and which are in
perfect harmony with the principles taught in Scripture. The traditions
themselves cannot be in Scripture for the traditional Word of God cannot be the
written Word of God. But Scripture itself says that tradition exists, and
that it is of equal authority with the written Word of God.
79.
79. Did not
Christ blame the Pharisees, saying, "Why do you transgress the commandment
of God for your tradition"? Matt. 15:3.
He did, but he
called it their tradition, condemning their erroneous and merely human
tradition, not the right traditions to which, according to St. Paul, we must
hold fast. You quote this text merely because it happens to contain the
word tradition, and without any appreciation of its true sense.
80.
80. St. Paul
himself warns us, "Beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain
deceit; according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of the
world, and not according to Christ." Coloss. 2:8.
The text warns
us against wrong traditions, but in no way condemns traditions which are not
merely of human invention, but which are according to Christ. St. Paul
does not contradict his own teaching.
81.
81. St. Peter
condemns tradition, saying, "You were not redeemed by your vain
conversation of the tradition of your fathers." 1 Pet. 1:18.
This is not a
condemnation of Christian traditions, but of doctrines held by those to whom
St. Peter wrote, and handed on to them by human tradition from their
fathers. These were the traditions our Lord condemned in Matt. 15:3.
82.
82. I admit the
force of Apostolic traditions for the early Christians. But they could be
sure of them as we cannot today.
Were the
Apostolic traditions part of the Christian faith then? Is it therefore
impossible to know the full Christian truth now? Did Christ mean it when
He said that He would be with His Church all days till the very end of the
world? Or would you suggest that He meant it, but could not accomplish
it? He sent the Church to teach all things, yet you say that it is
impossible today. Be sure that the Catholic Church has all necessary
traditions embodied in her teachings. Within her fold each succeeding
generation of Bishops has taught faithful men who have been fit to teach others
also. But you refuse to be taught by that Church. You rely upon
your own fallible judgment. And as long as you adopt that method you will
never be sure, not only of the Christian traditions, but even of the true
Christian doctrine to be derived from Scripture itself.
83.
83. You keep
insisting, not only upon tradition, but also upon the teaching authority of
your Church. Why follow her interpretations?
Because we
cannot safely follow the interpretation given by anybody else. All guides
except the Catholic Church confess to being fallible. The Catholic Church
alone claims infallibility, and proves her claim. I prefer to follow so
sure a guide. Those who refuse to do so are at sixes and sevens as to the
true meaning of Christianity.
84.
84. Have not
laymen as much intelligence as priests?
Apart from the
fact that priests give, not their own human ideas, but the teachings of the
Catholic Church, it is certain that the layman cannot know theological matters
as do priests, even as you are not as well acquainted with jurisprudence and
surgery as lawyers and doctors. A specialist in a subject, by years of
study, is bound to know more of that subject than the man in the street.
If an average man is so liable to error in the interpretation of human law, how
can he have the vanity to think himself expert in the interpretation of divine
legislation?
85.
85. What special
qualifications has the Catholic Church in the interpretation of Scripture?
(1) The New
Testament was written by members of the Catholic Church. She existed
before a line of the New Testament was written. Protestantism came on the
scene centuries afterwards. The Gospels are really the family papers of
the Catholic Church, and she alone, possessing the family traditions, can
interpret what those family papers really mean. (2) The Catholic Church
carefully and jealously preserved the Bible through the ages, so that
Protestants would have no Gospel were it not for her. (3) She has been
much more faithful to Scripture than any of the Protestant Churches.
Whilst many Protestant leaders are prepared to sacrifice the Bible in order to
appear scientific and modern, the Catholic Church consistently demands that
every jot and tittle of God's Word must be accepted in the original sense
intended by God. (4) The Protestant Churches owe their separate
existences to the fact that each denies that the others really know what
Scripture means. (5) The Catholic Church was established by Christ as the
rule of faith, and He declared that a man is to be regarded as a heathen if he
will not hear the Church. The Catholic Church is the only qualified
interpreter of Scripture.
86.
86. The Bible
tells us to prove all things. 1 Thess. 5:21. The Catholic Church
demands that her adherents prove nothing, accepting all on her authority, and
without question.
Have you proved
all things? Your own fantastic interpretations show that you have
not. The text you quote has a meaning very different from that you
attribute to it. It refers to conduct. The full text is,
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. From all appearance
of evil refrain yourselves." In other words, "Reflect, test,
examine your conscience before you act, and do the right thing." In
the same way, St. Paul said that one who desires to receive the Holy Eucharist
must "prove himself, and so let him eat, for he that eateth and drinketh
unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself." 1Cor.
11:28. Your interpretation of Catholic requirements is just as
fantastic. The Catholic Church does not demand that her adherents prove
nothing.
She wants them
to examine the reasons for their Catholic faith, and prove the claims of their
Church. We prove that she is the only possible Church historically,
Scripturally, and logically, and that she must be infallible. Then when
she speaks in the Name of Christ we reasonably accept her teachings. If I
consult a doctor whom I know to be competent, I accept his decisions. I
do not fight every inch of the way, disputing, arguing, and challenging his
statements. So, once I know that the Catholic Church is divinely
qualified to speak the truth in religious matters, I accept her decisions and
definitions. Nothing could be more wise than that. In fact, it
would be sheer folly to do otherwise.
What Non-Catholics say about Protestantism and the Bible: Addressing
the "Bible League," Dr. Booth says:
"If
the assaults on the Scriptures continue, the time will come when to those
always faithful to God there will be but one refuge, and that will be the Roman
Catholic Church."
Says the Rev. C. Tinsley, a
Methodist minister:
"The
Bible is a very embarrassing book because of its many contradictions."
In "History of
Literature" by Hallam, we read:
"The
translation of the Old and the New Testaments by Luther is more renowned for
the purity of his German idiom than for its adherence to the original
text. Simon has charged him with ignorance of Hebrew and when we consider
how late he came to a knowledge of that or the Greek language, and the
multiplicity of his employments, it may be believed that his knowledge of them
was far from extensive."
The Rev. Dr. Aked, a Baptist
minister, writing in "Appleton’s Magazine," Sept. , 1908, said:
"In
the pages of the Protestant Version of the Bible are to be found historical
errors, arithmetical mistakes, inconsistencies and manifold contradictions,
and, what is far worse, one finds that the most horrible crimes are committed
by men who plea, ‘God said,’ in justification of their terrible misdeeds.
Moreover, the English Bible is a version of a version which is a translation of
a translation. It has come down through Hebrew, Greek and Latin into
English. In all its earlier stages it was copied by hand from one
manuscript to another by different writers, a process certain to result in many
mistakes."
The Anglican Bishop of London,
Eng., Dr. Ingraham, says:
"At
the present moment, there is only one Church in England that officially accepts
the Scriptures as the infallible Word of God, and that Church is the Church of
Rome."
Dr. Decosta said:
"The
Church of Rome stands before the English-speaking world and Protestants
everywhere as the solitary defender of the Bible in its integrity and
entirety."
The Rev. O. J. Nelson, of
Bellingham, Wash., says:
"Strictly
speaking, none but the Catholic has an infallible Bible and none but the
Catholic can be rightly called an orthodox Christian . . . There is only one
Christian Church of real and consistent authority and that is the Catholic
Church."
Charles Buder, in his "Horae
Biblicae," says:
"For
the sacred writings which contain the Word of God, and for the traditions of
the wise and good respecting it, we are almost wholly indebted, under
Providence, to the zeal and exertion of the priests and monks of the Church of
Rome."
The Protestant Biblical critic,
George Campbell, says:
"The
Vulgate may be pronounced, on the whole, a good and faithful version."
An editorial in the New York
"Sun," says:
"The
time is coming, if, indeed, it has not already, when these Churches must take
their stand definitely and decidedly on the question whether the Bible is of
God or only of man. As it is now, the Pope is the sole bold, positive and
uncompromising champion of the Bible as the Word of God."
Rev. Dr. A. S. Crapsey, addressing
the "Free Religious Association":
"Most
of the Protestant denominations are drifting backward, gravitating toward the
Catholic. They are losing their intellectual leadership by not keeping
pace with the scholars. Protestantism will follow and obey the law of
gravitation, disintegrate, and thus lose all power."
The Methodist Bishop, Dr. Seliew:
"The
spirit of Protestantism is declining in America with the progress of
Catholicism. It is dying, and will soon be a thing of the past."
IMPRIMATUR:Joannes Gregorius
Murray Archiepiscopus Sancti Pauli.
Written by Fr. Chas. M.
Carty Rev. Dr. L. Rumble, M.S.C. Copyright 1976 by TAN Books and Publishers,
Inc.
Originally published by
Fathers Rumble and Carty Radio Replies Press, Inc.
St. Paul, Minn., U.S.A. Complete and Unabridged
Copies
of this article available from:
Our
Lady of the Rosary Library
4016
Preston Hwy. Louisville, KY 40213
Phone
(502) 468-9736 from 7AM to 9PM EST
You can order the above in booklet form for $1 from the
above address.
The postage & handling is $2 on all orders, for book
rate. If you want it
faster, check the website: http://www.olrl.org
Next: this is the text of a booklet by the same priests as
above. Don’t let the title throw you.
1.
1.
Why do you Catholics worship Mary as a goddess?
It would be
mortal sin for any Catholic to regard Mary as a goddess. If a
Catholic expressed such a belief to a priest in Confession he would be refused
absolution unless he promised to renounce such as an absurd idea. If you
wish to attack Catholic doctrine, at least find out what Catholics do believe
before you begin. We Catholics do not give worship to Mary, the
Mother of Christ, but what we do give to her is the best that we can in the
giving, namely, homage, veneration, reverence, but never worship.
We have enough intelligence to know that Mary the woman who gave human bone,
human flesh, and human feature to the Savior of Mankind was not a goddess but a
human member of the human race. Although she is a member of our race we
hail her as the First Lady of Heaven and of Earth.
2.
2.
The genealogies of Christ as given by the Gospel afford one much
difficulty. If Jesus was not the son of Joseph, why is His genealogy
traced through Joseph?
Jesus was not
the natural son of Joseph. But Mary, who was the Mother of Jesus, was
related to Joseph, whose genealogy was also her own. It was a Jewish
custom to record descent only through the male line.
3.
3.
If you call her Queen of Heaven do you not do her an injustice in
refusing to her the title of goddess?
It would be the
greatest possible injustice to regard her as a goddess. It is just to
honor her even as God has honored her, which we Catholics do. Jesus is
King of kings and Lord of lords, and His mother certainly possesses queenly
dignity holding the highest place in Heaven next to her Divine Son.
But that does not, and cannot change her finite and created human nature.
To regard her as a goddess would be absurd.
4.
4.
Yet you insist that she is the Mother of God!
Jesus Christ is
true God and true man, and as He was born of Mary she is truly the Mother of
God. The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was born of her according
to the humanity He derived from her. She is not a goddess, for God did
not take His Divine Being from her. But she is the Mother of God since
the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was truly born of her in His human
nature.
5.
5.
How could Mary be the mother of the One who created her?
Mary owed her
being, of course, to God, but this under the aspect of His eternal
nature. Subsequent to her creation that human nature was born of her
which the Son of God had assumed to Himself. She was, therefore, the
mother of Christ. But Christ was one Divine Person existing in two
natures, one eternal and divine; the other, temporal and human.
Mary necessarily gave birth to a being with one personality and that divine,
and she is rightly called the Mother of God.
6.
6.
Does not the Catholic Church insist also upon the biologically
impossible dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary herself?
The dogma of
the Immaculate Conception of Mary has nothing to do with biology. It does
not mean that she was conceived miraculously in the physical sense. She
was normally conceived and born of her parents, Joachim and Ann. But in
her very conception her soul was preserved immaculate in the sense that
she inherited no stain of original sin, derived from our first parents.
7.
7.
According to Catholic doctrine the Sacrament of Baptism destroys
original sin. Would you say that Mary did not need Baptism?
Mary did not
need Baptism insofar as that sacrament was instituted for the destruction of
original sin. She received that sacrament in order to participate in its
other effects, and chiefly in order to receive the Christian character which
that sacrament impress upon the soul. Mary was not the only one born into
this world free of original sin. Jeremias, the prophet, picked out
by God to preach penance to the Chosen People of God, was sanctified by the
action of God, whilst being carried in the womb of his mother so that when he
was born he was free of original sin. Jer. 1:5. St. John the
Baptist was likewise sanctified in the womb of his mother Elizabeth because he
was picked out by God to point out to mankind the Lamb of God, the Messiah,
Luke 1:41. Jeremias and St. John were conceived in original sin but
before birth were cleansed of original sin. Mary was never conceived in
original sin and thus it is only by this privilege that she was never under
the dominion of the evil spirit. It is only by the privilege of the
Immaculate Conception that Mary can be the woman of whom God speaks in prophecy
to Satan after the fall of the first parents, Adam and Eve, when He says to the
serpent: "Because thou hast done this.... I will put enmities
between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; she shall crush
thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." Gen. 3:14-15.
8.
8.
If Mary was sinless she could not have needed redemption! Yet
is not Christ the Redeemer of every child of Adam?
Insofar as the
sin of Adam involved the whole human race in condemnation Mary needed
redeeming. But there are two ways of redeeming. God could allow one
to be born in sin and then purify the soul by subsequent application of
the merits of Christ, or He could, by an anticipation of the merits of
Christ, exempt a soul from an actual contraction of original sin. Thus He
exempted Mary from any actual inheritance of the sin, and she owes her
exemption to the anticipated merits of Christ. In other words, she was
redeemed by Christ by prevention rather than by subsequent purification.
9.
9.
Is there any evidence in Scripture that Mary was indeed never
actually subject to original sin?
Yes. In
Gen. 3:15, God said to Satan, "I will put enmities between thee and the
woman ... thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." The radical enmity
between Satan and that second Eve, the Mother of Christ, forbids her having
been under the dominion of Satan, as she would have been had she ever
contracted original sin in actual fact. In Lk. 1:28, we read how the
Angel was sent by God to salute Mary with the words, "Hail, full of
grace." Grace excludes sin, and had there been any sin at all in
Mary she could not have been declared to be filled with grace. The
Protestant version translates the phrase as "thou that hast been highly
favored." But the Greek certainly implies "completely filled
with holiness." However, complaints that our doctrine exempts Mary
from the contracting of original sin are becoming more and more rare in a world
which is tending to deny original sin altogether, and which wishes to exempt
everybody from it.
10.
10. St. Paul
says that one died for all, and therefore all were dead. 2 Cor. 5:14-15.
Such texts must
be interpreted in the light of other passages where God reveals that Mary was
never under the dominion of Satan. Mary is included in these words of St.
Paul juridically insofar as she was born of Adam, but she was not allowed to be
born in sin to be afterwards redeemed. She was redeemed by prevention.
11.
11. St. John
knew the Mother of Christ better than the others, yet he does not mention her
Immaculate Conception!
In Rev. 12 he
shows clearly his knowledge of the deadly opposition between Mary and
Satan. His Gospel he wrote to supplement the Synoptic accounts, and
sufficient details had been given concerning Mary herself by St. Luke.
Omission to mention a fact in a given book is not proof that the writer did not
know of it, and above all if it does not fall within the scope of his work.
12.
12. Did the
early Church know anything of this doctrine?
St. Augustine,
in the fourth century wrote: "When it is a matter of sin we must
except the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom I will have no question raised,
owing to the honor due to our Lord." St. Ephrem, also in the fourth
century, taught very clearly the Immaculate Conception of Mary, likening her to
Eve before the fall. The Oriental Churches celebrated the feast of the
Immaculate Conception as early as the seventh century. When Pope
Pius IX defined the Catholic doctrine in 1854 he gave, not a new truth
to be added to Christian teaching, but merely defined that this doctrine was part
of Christian teaching from the very beginning, and that it is to be
believed by all as part of Christian revelation.
13.
13. Your
infallible Church allowed St. Bernard to remain in ignorance of this doctrine.
Since the
Church had not then given any infallible definition on the subject St. Bernard
naturally could not be guided by it. St. Bernard believed that Mary was
born free from sin, but he was puzzled as to the moment of her
sanctification. He thought the probable explanation to be that she was conceived
in sin, but purified as was St. John the Baptist prior to her actual
birth. But he did not regard this opinion as part of his Faith.
Meantime his error was immaterial prior to the final authentic decision of the
infallible Church. St. Bernard believed all that God had taught and all
that the Catholic Church had clearly set forth in her definitions prior to his
time.
14.
14. Did not St.
Thomas Aquinas deny the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception?
His opinion was
probably much the same as that of St. Bernard. Before the definite
decision of the Church was given theologians were free to discuss the
matter. But the Church has since defined that the soul of Mary was never
subject for a single moment to the stain of original sin. Both St.
Bernard and St. Thomas would have been very glad to have had the assistance of
such a definition.
15.
15. Why did the
Church withhold that honor from Mary for so long a time?
Since Mary
always possessed that honor the Church did not withhold it from her. The definition
that Mary did possess such an honor was given by the Church when necessity demanded
it. There was no real dispute about this matter in the early
Church. In the middle ages theologians attempted a deeper analysis of the
privileges of Mary, and with no infallible decision of the Church to help them,
some theologians arrived at defective conclusions chiefly because of the
defective psychology of the times. Some theologians held that Mary was
preserved from original sin from the very moment of her conception; others said
from the moment of her animation; yet others that she was purified at a moment
subsequent both to her conception and to her animation. All admitted that
she was sanctified prior to her actual birth. Now that the Church has
spoken there is no doubt on the subject.
16.
16. Did not
Franciscans and Dominicans attack each other bitterly over the Immaculate
Conception?
They indulged
in much controversy, but - it was a free matter for discussion until the Church
had given her definite ruling. The Catholic Church demands unity in
doctrines which have been definitely decided, liberty in matters still
undecided, and charity always. I admit that her ideals of charity have
not always been maintained by her wayward children in theological controversies,
but that is no fault of the Church.
17.
17. Did not
Philip III and Philip IV ask the Pope Paul V, Gregory V, and Alexander VII to
define the Immaculate Conception in order to stop the wrangling, the Popes
replying that the doctrine was not definable as not being in Scripture?
The Popes have never
given such a decision. Paul V in 1617 forbade anyone to teach publicly
that Mary was not immaculate. Gregory V in 1612 ordered the discussion to
stop until the Church should have given an official decision.
Alexander VII said that the Immaculate Conception of Mary was the common
doctrine of the Church and that no one must deny it. None of these
Popes gave a dogmatic definition, but rather a disciplinary
ruling. Pope Pius IX. defined the doctrine finally in 1854.
18.
18. Why call
Mary a virgin? Seeing that she was a mother. The linking of the two
terms is an insult to reason.
The assertion
that an omnipotent God is limited by the natural laws, which He Himself
established, is an insult to reason. Jesus, the child of Mary, was
conceived miraculously without the intervention of any human father, and
was born miraculously, Mary's virginity being preserved throughout. I do
not claim that any natural laws were responsible for this event. I claim
that God was responsible, and the only way you can show that the doctrine is
not reasonable is by proving that there is no God, or that He could not do what
Catholic doctrine asserts.
19.
19. Where does
it say in Scripture that Mary was ever virgin?
Isaiah the
prophet (7:14) certainly predicted a supernatural and extraordinary birth of
the Messiah when he wrote, "The Lord Himself shall give you a sign.
Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son; and his name shall be called
Emmanuel." St. Luke says, "The angel Gabriel was sent from God
... to a virgin ... and the virgin's name was Mary." When Mary was
offered the dignity of becoming the mother of the Messiah, a privilege to which
any Jewish maiden would ordinarily look forward with eager desire, she urged
against the prospect the fact that she had no intention of motherhood.
"How shall this be done, because I know not man." She
does not refer to the past, but by using the present tense indicates her
present and persevering intention. The angel assured her that her child
would be due to the miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit, and that she would
not be asked to forfeit the virginity she prized so highly, and then only did
she consent. Luke 1:26-38. When Jesus was born, Mary had none of
the suffering usually associated with childbirth. The child was born
miraculously. Mary herself in no way incapacitated. She herself
attended to her own needs and those of the child. "She brought forth
her first-born son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a
manger." Lk. 2:7. The Virgin Birth means that Mary had at one
and the same time the privilege of Motherhood and the privilege of Maidenhood.
20.
20. Did not
Mary, to cloak her own sin, persuade St. Joseph that her child was of the Holy
Ghost?
No. That
is absolutely false. Mary, saluted by an angel as full of grace, was the
purest and holiest woman who ever lived on this earth. And, as a matter
of fact, with sublime confidence in God, Mary refrained from explaining the
event to St. Joseph, leaving all to God. As St. Matthew Mt. I, 20, tells
us, "Behold the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep, saying,
'Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which
is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.'" What you suggest has
been said by certain people merely because the Catholic Church honors
Mary. Their hatred of the Catholic Church is so great that they dislike
all she loves, and are willing to overlook any injury to Christ in fostering
their hatred. Yet how can they hope to please Christ by dishonoring
His mother? Every true child bitterly resents disrespect to his mother,
and Christ was the beat son who ever lived. The more we honor Mary the
more we honor Christ, for the honor we show her is because of Christ. If
He were not the central figure, Mary would have been forgotten long ago.
21.
21. If Jesus was
born of a virgin why does he say nothing about it?
We do not know
that He said nothing about it. The evangelists do not record any special
utterances of Christ on this subject, but they do not pretend to record all
that He ever said. St. Luke tells us that when He met the two disciples
on the way to Emmaus, "beginning at Moms and all the prophets, He
expounded to them in all the Scriptures, the things that were concerning
him." 24:27. There is every probability that He explained His
advent into this world according to the prophecy of Isaiah. Meantime the
Gospels do record the fact that Mary was a virgin, and their words are
as reliable in this as when they record the utterances of Christ.
22.
22. To prove
Davidic descent both Matthew and Luke give the Genealogy of Joseph, useless
were not Joseph the father of Christ.
The genealogy
of Joseph was that of Mary also. They were kinspeople of the same Davidic
stock. The Jews as a rule counted their generations only in the male
line, and such a generation alone would appeal to the Jews for whom Matthew
above all wrote. The same St. Matthew records that the angel told Joseph
that the child was conceived miraculously by the Holy Ghost and not through the
intervention of man. St. Luke in turn left no doubt as to his mind on the
subject when he carefully wrote that "Jesus Himself was beginning about
the age of thirty years; being (as it was supposed) the son of Joseph."
3:23.
23.
23. St. Matthew
says that Joseph knew her not till she brought forth her first-born son:
1:25.
Nor did
he. And the expression "till" in Hebrew usage has no necessary
reference to the future. Thus in Gen. 8:7, we read that "the dove
went forth from the ark and did not return till the waters dried
up." That expression does not suggest that it returned then.
It did not return at all, having found resting places. Nor does the
expression firstborn child imply that there were other children afterwards.
Thus Exodus says, "Every first-born shall be sanctified unto
God." Parents had not to wait to see if other children were born
before they could call the first their first-born!
24.
24. Matt.
13:55-56 says, "His brethren James and Joseph, and Simon and Jude: and his
sisters, are they not all with us?"
The Jewish
expression "brothers and sisters of the Lord" in Scripture merely
refers to relationship in the same tribe or stock. Cousins often
came under that title. In all nations the word brother has a wide
significance, as when one Mason will call another a brother Mason without
suggesting that he was born of the same mother. The same St. Matthew
speaks explicitly of "Mary, the mother of James and Joseph" in 27:56,
obviously alluding to a Mary who was not the mother of Jesus but who was
married to Cleophas, the brother of Joseph.
25.
25. There would
not he two girls in the one family called Mary.
There certainly
could be. And St. John 19:25, writes that there stood by the cross of
Jesus "His mother, and His mother's sister, Mary of Cleophas."
But even here, Mary of Cleophas need not have been a sister in the first degree
of blood-relationship, but rather of the same lineage in more remote degrees of
either consanguinity or affinity.
26.
26. Why are
Protestants, who believe in Scripture, so convinced that Mary had other
children?
They are not
inspired by love for Christ, or for the mother of Christ, or for Scripture in
their doctrine. Their main desire is to maintain a doctrine differing
from that of the Catholic Church. But it is a position which is rapidly
going out of fashion. Learned Protestant scholars today deny as
emphatically as any Catholic that Mary had other children. When Our Lord,
dying on the cross, commended His mother to the care of St. John, He did so
precisely because He was her only child, and He knew that Mary had no
other children to care for her. The idea that Mary had other children is disrespectful
to the Holy Spirit who claimed and sanctified her as His sanctuary. It
insults Christ, who was the only-begotten of His mother even as He was the
only-begotten of His Heavenly Father. It insults Mary, who would have
been guilty of a great ingratitude to God, if she threw away the gift of
virginity which God had so carefully preserved for her in the conception of
Christ. It insults St. Joseph. God had told him by an angel to take
Mary to wife, and that the child to be born of her had no earthly father
but was the very Son of God. God merely gave St. Joseph the privilege
of protecting her good name amongst the undiscerning Jews, and He chose a
God-fearing man who would respect her. Knowing that her child was God
Himself in human form, Joseph would at once regard her as on a plane far
superior to that of any ordinary human being, and to him, as to us, the
mere thought of her becoming a mother to merely earthly children would have
seemed a sacrilege.
27.
27. You urge
these privileges granted to Mary as the foundation of your devotion to her, yet
Christ said, "Rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep
it." Luke 11:28.
Would you
presume to say that Mary, whom the angel addressed as full of grace, did not
hear the Word of God and keep it? You have missed the sense of the
passage to which you allude. In Luke 11:27, a woman praised the one who
had the honor to be the mother of Christ. Christ did not for a moment
deny it, as you would like to believe. The sense of His words is simple,
"Yes, she is blessed. But better to hear God's word and keep it,
thus attain holiness, than to be My mother. You cannot all imitate Mary
by being My mother; but you can do so by hearing God's word and keeping
it." The thought that those who hear God's word and keep it are
rather blessed than Mary because she did not is simply absurd.
"Henceforth," declared Mary prophetically, "all generations
shall call me blessed." Lk. 1:48. And Elizabeth saluted her
with the words, "Blessed art thou among women." Lk. 1:42.
28.
28. How do you
prove Mary's bodily assumption into Heaven?
No Christian
could dispute the fact that Mary's soul is in Heaven. Christ certainly
did not suffer the soul of His own mother to be lost. The doctrine of her
bodily assumption after her death is not contained in Scripture, but is
guaranteed by tradition and by the teaching of the Catholic
Church. That Scripture omits to record the fact is no argument against
it. Omission is not denial. Meantime, early traditions
positively record the fact, and negatively we note that, whilst the mortal
remains of a St. Peter and of a St. Paul are jealously possessed and honored in
Rome, no city or Christian center has ever claimed to possess the mortal
remains of Our Lady. Certainly relics of Our Lady would be regarded as
having greater value than those of any Saint or Apostle, so nearly was she
related to Christ. And it was most fitting that the body of Mary, who had
been preserved even from the taint of original sin, should not have been
allowed to corrupt. After all, it was just as easy for God to take her
glorified body to Heaven at once as it will be to take the glorified
bodies of all the saved at the last day. However, the definite sanction
of this doctrine by the Catholic Church is sufficient assurance of the fact.
29.
29. I have
discovered 27 virgin-born Saviors in my studies of mythology.
You would find
it difficult to name them. However, granting that you have read of some
such claims, a little further study would show you that a critical and,
comparative examination such as Christian doctrine has had to undergo, leaves
these mythological claims devoid of reality, whilst the Christian fact emerges
unscathed.
30.
30. At evening
devotions in a Catholic Church I heard many prayers to Mary. I cannot find in
Scripture where Mary is to be worshipped in the same way as Christ.
I am not
surprised, for such a doctrine is nowhere taught in Scripture. Moreover
if any Catholic dared to worship Mary in the same way as he worships Christ, he
would be guilty of a most serious sin, and no Catholic priest could give him
absolution unless he promised never to do so again. But that does not
mean that one must deprive Mary of all honor.
31.
31. St.
Bonaventure said, "Into thy hands, O Lady, I commend my
spirit." Thus he served the creature more than the creator to whom
alone such words should be addressed.
St. Bonaventure
did not serve the creature more than the Creator. In commending his soul
to Mary he was not commending it to anyone opposed to God. He did is
because of God, who chose Mary as the second Eve. Eve brought us forth to
misery and to death; Mary brought us forth to happiness and to life when she
brought forth our Saviour. Like the kings from the East, St. Bonaventure
knew that after the long journey through this life, he would also find the child
Jesus with Mary, His mother, and that if he commended his soul to the mother he
would necessarily find himself in the presence of the child, even in
eternity. Gladly on my own deathbed would I utter the words used by St.
Bonaventure. As Jesus came to us through Mary, so we shall go to Him
through her, whether we think of it or not.
32.
32. Mary is no
different from your own mother.
As the street
Arab replied to a similar objection. "But there's an immense
difference between the sons. My mother is the mother of me. Mary is
the mother of God."
33.
33. You speak as
if Jesus looks on His mother just as you look on your mother.
As surely as my
mother is my mother, He knows that His mother is His mother; and He treats her
as such.
34.
34. Jesus was a
good son but he recognized only one being, the omnipotent God.
Had he ignored
Mary He would not have been a very good son, nor would He have had much respect
for God who said, "Honor thy father and thy mother." Christ was
a perfect example of virtue in all things. And if He did not recognize
Mary, why did He go down to Nazareth and be subject to her? Why did he
perform His first miracle at her request? And why did He make such
special provision for her at the moment of His death?
35.
35. When someone
praised Mary, Christ paid no attention, but said that only those are blessed
who keep the word of God. Lk. 11:28.
The Gospels are
fragmentary accounts, and we do not know all that transpired on that
occasion. But even so, the actual text is not opposed in any way to the
honor we give to Mary. Someone praised Mary. Christ replied,
"Yea, rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep
it." Not for a moment did He intend to deny that Mary had done
this. He practically says, "Yes. She is blest in being my mother.
But it is a greater blessing to serve God." And, from one point of
view, the fidelity with which Mary undoubtedly served God was a greater
blessing to her than merely being the mother of Christ. Any idea that
Christ, the best of sons, was trying to belittle His mother is absurd.
And if you have such faith in Scripture, what do you do as regards the prophecy
of Mary in Lk. 1:48? "From henceforth," she predicted,
"all generations shall call me blessed." Yet blessed are they
who hear the word of God and keep it! We Catholics call Mary blessed
indeed, whilst many Protestants search Scripture in the fond hope of proving
something to her discredit!
36.
36. Christ
called her, "Woman," when he said, "Woman behold thy
son." John 19:26.
In the language
Christ spoke, that word was a term of great respect however harshly it
may sound in our modern English language. Our Lord would have been the
last to slight His mother, a thing we despise in every man; and above all in
His last and most tender words to her. Nor are we likely to please Him by
seeking to dishonor her.
37.
37. Did He not
say to her at the marriage feast of Cana, "Woman, what is that to thee and
to Me?" John 2:4.
He did.
But most certainly He intended no reproach to Mary. Her action was one of
pure charity to others. Foreseeing the possible distress of others, she
asked Him to relieve them; and He would not rebuke so unselfish a
thought. Nor would He speak to her with any trace of disrespect.
Then, too, had Mary asked a wrong thing, Christ would not have done it, nor
would He have sanctioned a request He had to rebuke. And Mary knew that
she had not been reprehended, or she would not have told the waiters to do what
her Son would tell them. She would have dropped the matter. Why,
then, did Christ speak thus? It was His first miracle, the first public
sign of His divinity wrought by Himself. And He wanted to bring out
publicly the fact that He was doing it, not as the son of an earthly mother and
according to His human nature, but calling upon His divine nature as the
eternal Son of God. He did it because His mother requested it, but He did
not do it by any power derived from His mother. He thus brought out both
for the listeners and for us that this beginning of miracles was proof of His
divinity, although in appearance He seemed but man.
38.
38. Why do you
call Mary Queen of Heaven?
Because Mary is
undoubtedly in Heaven, and Jesus is King of Heaven. Since Jesus is
"King of kings and Lord of lords," it is certain that Mary His mother
rejoices in queenly dignity.
39.
39. Why pray to
Mary at all?
Because God
wills that we should do so, and because such prayers to her are of the utmost
value. God often wills to give certain favors only on condition that
we go to some secondary agent. Sodom was to be spared through the intercession
of Abraham; Gen. 18:20-33. Naaman, the leper, was to be cured only through the
waters of the Jordan, 4 Kings 5:9-14. Now Mary is, and must ever remain, the
Mother of Christ. She still has a mother's rights and privileges, and is
able to obtain for us many graces. But let us view things
reasonably. If I desire to pray, I can certainly pray to God directly.
Yet would you blame me if, at times, I were to ask my own earthly mother
to pray for me also? Such a request is really a prayer to her that she
may intercede for me with God. Certainly, if I met the mother of Christ
on earth, I would ask her to pray for me, and she would do so. And in her
more perfect state with Christ in Heaven she is more able to help me.
40.
40. But a prayer
to God directly must be more efficacious than a prayer to Mary.
Not
necessarily. It might well be that God intends to honor Our Lady by
granting the favor I seek through her intercession in a particular way.
In that case the grace is to be given through her provided I honor her by
addressing myself to her. Again, every prayer to Mary is in reality the
asking of a favor also. It is often better to ask God for a favor and to
have someone else praying to God with one for the same favor. Two prayers
are better than one. And above all, when the other one praying is
Christ's own mother.
41.
41. God loves
you more than Mary loves you.
That is
so. But He loves Mary more than He loves me. And as she is more
pleasing to God than I am, He will be more ready to grant her requests.
42.
42. It is
unscriptural to attribute power to Mary.
That is a very
unscriptural statement. At His mother's request Jesus changed water into
wine at Cana, though He had said, "My time is not yet come."
John 2:4. St. James tells us that "the prayer of a just man availeth
much." Ja. 5:16. How much more the prayer of Mary!
43.
43. Does the
Bible sanction such prayers to Mary?
Yes. All
through the Bible you will find God conferring favors through the prayer of others.
In the Old Testament we read of the prayers of Abraham, Moses, and of the
various prophets. In the New Testament, St. James 5:16, tells us to
"pray for one another," in the text I have just quoted. If we
must always pray directly to God and may not ask the prayers of others why did
St. Paul write to the Thessalonians, "Pray for us that we may be delivered
from importunate and evil men"? 2 Thess. 3:2. Why did he not
ask directly of God, instead of asking the prayers of the Thessalonians?
Or would you be more scriptural than the New Testament itself?
44.
44. There is but
one mediator, - there is no place for Mary.
Christ is the
principal mediator in His own right, Mary is a secondary mediatrix, through,
with, and in Christ. Without Him she would have no power, and therefore
He is the source of all mediation with God on behalf of men.
45.
45. How can you
blend the mediation of others with that of Christ?
It follows from
the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. Remember that, by Baptism, every
Christian is incorporated with Christ. St. Paul says, "Christ is the
head; ye are the members." 1 Cor. 11:3; 12:27. So close is
this union that Christ says, "Whoever gives you to drink a cup of water in
my name because you belong to Christ; amen, I say to you, he shall not lose his
reward." Mk. 9:40. Every Christian is Christ in a most
intimate way. St. Paul tells us that if a baptized person sins, he takes the
members of Christ and makes them the members of iniquity! When that same
St. Paul was persecuting the Christians before his conversion, Christ appeared
to him and said, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest Thou Me?"
Acts 9:4. He did not say, "Why persecutest thou My
disciples?" He could equally say, when we pray to Mary or to the
saints, "What asketh thou of Me?" When we honor Our Lady or the
saints, we honor, not their own merely human and created nature, but we honor
Christ in them according to the doctrines of Scripture. The Catholic
Church is the only completely scriptural Church.
46.
46. Do Catholics
believe that Mary is omnipotent?
No. God
alone is omnipotent. But through Mary we have access to the omnipotence
of God.
47.
47. How do you
know that Mary hears you?
The Catholic
Church guarantees that, and she is here to tell us the truth about such things in
the name of Christ and with His authority. Reason also assures us that,
as she could know our prayers in this life and pray for us in turn, so she can
do so in the more perfect state in Heaven. Finally, experience proves it,
for she has manifested her power in thousands of concrete instances in answer
to prayer.
48.
48. Why should
Mary be recognized as being greater than any other woman?
She was picked
out by God to be the sacred repository of God's own Son, to furnish, so to
speak, the human texture, flesh, and blood from which was to be woven the garb
of divinity. If before birth we could have the privilege of choosing
our own natural mother, and if we ever had the power of making that mother
whatever we chose, would we ever make her short of anything but the loveliest
lady in the world, or would we ever have endowed her with those qualities which
would make us apologize to men either for moral blemishes or physical
weaknesses? No. I think we would give to her the qualities and
virtues which would make all men love her eternally. If you and I then,
... with our natural natures would have done all this to the woman who gave us
life, who meant so much to us, should we not suppose that God would do the same
and more for the Mother of His Son? This he did do. He arrayed her
in the peerless jewel of Divine Grace, a grace that was higher than any grace
given to any mint, angel, or archangel. Angels were created to serve
God. Mary was created to be the Mother, the shrine, the tabernacle of
God-made Man. Mary is to be honored above all women as the prophecies of
the Old Testament declare, precisely because of the royal role she plays as
Co-Redemptrix with Christ in the Divine Redemption.
49.
49. I don't see
the necessity of hailing her as the Co-Redemptrix with Christ.
See then what
is happening to the non-Catholic world for denying that role of Mary. In
Catholicism, they tell us, there is too much emphasis and the wrong
emphasis on the Mother of Jesus. If we ever begin a religion by eliminating
the Mother, we shall eventually wind up by eliminating the Son.
Thus when the Reformers did away with the Mother, they paved the way for doing
away with the Son. If we get rid of the one, we will soon get rid of the
other. Germany began by putting the Mother in the tomb of oblivion or on
the dusty pages of history and after four hundred years Germany is now trying
to get rid of the Son. If we can judge correctly the attitude of the
American Federation of Churches, our Blessed Savior is being rapidly brought
down to the mere status of a man. We can reasonably be suspicious that
religions that have taken Mary out, have slurred this wonderful lady, and when
we insult the Mother we insult the Son. We can never have a Son without a
Mother in the natural order of things; in the Divine order of things we can
never have a Christ without a Mary. If we smash her statues and
white-wash Our Lady's Chapel or chisel the Child from the Mother, we run the
risk of smashing the entire statue of Christianity, for those two holy heads of
Jesus and Mary are too close together for their halos not to mingle and to
cross.
50.
50. Attending a
Catholic Church one evening I was disgusted by the rigmarole called the
Rosary. What in the Rosary?
The Rosary is a
special form of devotion to Mary. One takes a set of beads,
divided into five sections, each section consisting of one large bead and ten
small beads. Holding the large bead, one says the Our Father, and on each
of the small ones, the Hail Mary. Between each section or decade the
Gloria is said. Whilst saying the prayers, one meditates or thinks of the
joys, or sorrows, or glories of Christ's life and of that of His Mother.
It is a very beautiful form of prayer with which you were disgusted merely
because you did not understand it. The Rosary is a Bible for the Blind
and the unlearned. In the so-called Dark Ages which were indeed
the Ages of Faith, the Church taught the great masses, who could not read, the
mysteries of the Bible through the meditations of the Rosary.
51.
51. The Rosary
is a relic of the superstitious Middle Ages, when it was meant for ignorant
people.
The use of
beads dates from the earliest centuries. The prayers embodied in the
Rosary were composed by Christ Himself in the case of the Our Father and by the
Angel Gabriel, St. Elizabeth, and the Council of Ephesus in the 5th century, in
the case of the Hail Mary. We are in very good company with those
prayers. As a devotion, with its loving contemplation of the mysteries of
the life, death and resurrection of Our Lord it appeals to rich and poor, to
learned and ignorant alike, as Christianity itself was meant to do.
52.
52. When were
beads invented, and what do they symbolize?
It is
impossible to say when beads were first used. As an aid to memory, the
early Christians used to put a number of pebbles in one pocket, transferring
them to another as they said each prayer, so that they could be sure of
completing such prayers each day as their devotion inspired. Later,
berries or pebbles were strung together for the purpose. In the Middle
Ages sections of these beads were adapted to the different meditations which
compose the Rosary, the sections being a numerical help to meditate for a given
period of time upon each allotted subject. The symbolism is expressed in
the word Rosary. A Rosary is a garland of flowers. One rose does
not make a Rosary. Prayers are the flowers of the spiritual life, and in
offering that group of prayers, known as the Rosary, we lay a garland of
spiritual flowers at the feet of God.
53.
53. Christ did
not have a Crucifix or Rosary beads.
He made the
first Crucifix. That He did not use Rosary beads does not affect the
question. He never had a copy of the New Testament in His hands,
yet you do not reject the New Testament because of that!
54.
54. Between each
Our Father to God, it throws in ten prayers to Mary!
You've got it
the wrong way 'round. Between each ten Hail Marys an Our Father is
said. The Rosary is essentially a devotion to Mary, honoring her whom God
Himself so honored. And it honors her particularly in her relation to
Christ, whose life is the subject of the meditations. The Our Father
abstracts from the Incarnation of Christ; the Hail Mary is full of reverence to
Our Lord in His birth into this world for us.
55.
55. Would not
the Rosary be just as efficient if said with one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and
one Gloria?
It would not be
the Rosary then, but some other type of devotion. Nor would such a
devotion be as efficient, for meditation whilst saying ten Hail Marys is better
than meditation whilst saying one. But your trouble seems to be based on
the mere question of number. That is quite immaterial.
56.
56. It is
not. Christ said, "Use not vain repetitions as do the heathen, who
think in their much speaking to be heard." St. Mt. 6:7.
Vain repetition
in the manner of heathens is forbidden, but not useful repetition which
is not in the manner of heathens. Vain repetition relies mechanically
upon the mere number of prayers or formulas uttered. But Catholics do not
rely on the mere repetition of prayers, nor upon their multiplication, but on
the intrinsic worth of each prayer and upon the fervor and earnestness
with which it is said. Two prayers said well, one immediately after the
other, are as good as the same two prayers said well with twenty-four hours
between them. Time is nothing to God, in whose sight 1,000 years are but
as a day. He does not mind whether there be two seconds between our
prayers or two years; the prayers themselves are just as pleasing to Him.
If you take the principle behind your objection, and push it to its full
conclusion, you could say the Our Father but once in your life. If you
said it once each year, it would be repetition. How often may you say
it? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day? If daily,
what would be wrong with saying it hourly? If you have just concluded one
Our Father, why may you not begin it again at once? Does it suddenly
become an evil prayer?
Your Bible has
a faulty translation of these words, "Use not vain repetitions as the
heathens do." The Greek verb "battologein" of the original
does not mean such a thing at all. The Douay version translates correctly
when it says, "speak not much." St. Mt. wanted action
and less talk.
57.
57. If
repetition adds to effectiveness, why stop at ten Hail Marys? Why not
more?
It is the
nature of this devotion that the Rosary should be composed of decades, or
groups of ten. It would not be the Rosary otherwise. Repetition
certainly adds to effectiveness, if the prayers are said well. Just
before His passion, Christ prayed "the third time, saying the
self-same word." Mt. 26:44. He thought it good to say the same
prayer three times in succession. Why did He limit it to three
times? If good to say it three times, why not twenty times? He
thought three sufficient for His purpose. So, too, we consider the period
taken by the recital of ten Hail Marys sufficient time for the amount of
reflection we desire to give to each mystery of the Rosary.
58.
58. Does not
Scripture advise short prayer rather than long rosaries?
No. Long
hypocritical prayers are condemned. Prayer may be prolonged, but it must
not be hypocritical, mechanical, or insincere. Christ spoke a parable to
them that, "We ought always to pray, and not to faint." Lk.
18:1. He Himself "went out into a mountain to pray, and He passed
the whole night in prayer to God." Lk. 6:12. "We cease
not to pray for you," wrote St. Paul to the Colossians 1:9.
"Night and day we more abundantly pray for you," he wrote to the
Thessalonians 1 Thess. 3:10.
59.
59. Anyway short
mental prayers must be better than long distracted prayers.
Short fervent
interior prayers are better than long distracted vocal prayers. But,
given equally fervent prayers said with due attention, long ones are better
than short ones. It is certainly better to give more time to prayer than
less! And if distractions do present themselves, it is better to give up
the distractions than to give up the prayers. Mental prayer is good, but
vocal prayer is equally good if said well, and sometimes better. Thus
Christ taught the Apostles a vocal prayer called the Our Father. So well
did they learn it by heart that they were able to write it down years later
word for word.
60.
60. Why do you
omit from the Our Father the words "For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power,
and the Glory forever and ever"?
Because Our
Lord did not add those words to the prayer as He taught it. There is
nothing wrong with the words in themselves. In fact, they are very
beautiful. But they are not Sacred Scripture. Some early Catholic
copyist wrote those words in a margin; later copyist mistakenly transcribed
them into the text; and the Protestant translators made use of a copy of the
New Testament with the words thus included. All scholars today admit the
words to be an interpolation. We Catholics do not use them.
61.
61. Why do
Catholic Churches ring bells at daybreak, noon, and sunset?
The ringing of
these bells is to remind Catholics to say the Angelus, a short devotion in
honor of the incarnation of Christ. Three rings are given three times
separately, and then nine rings, according to an ancient custom. The
devotion is called the Angelus because the first words of the prayers to be
said begin as follows: "The Angel of the Lord declared unto
Mary." The Angelus, therefore, reminds us of the message of the
Angel Gabriel who brought the good news of the birth of Jesus Christ. And
Catholics are asked to begin the day by remembering this great benefit; to
recollect it again at noon, and at sunset or the close of the day. An old
English manuscript, written of course in England's Catholic days before the
Reformation, says that the Angelus in the morning should remind us of Christ's
resurrection at dawn; at noon of His death on the cross; and at eventide of His
birth at midnight in the cave in Bethlehem. In any case, the Angelus is
to remind Catholics of the fact that the Son of God came into this world for
the redemption of mankind, and that they themselves should never forget it.
62.
62. What do the
three threes, and the nine bells signify?
The origin of the
number of bells to be tolled is uncertain. The triple ringing reminds us
of the Most Holy Trinity. The final nine bells may have been arranged
merely for the sake of harmony and symmetry, although some writers see in that
number a reminder of the nine choirs of Angels who invite us to adore God with
them.
63.
63. Why pray to
Saints? Is it not better to pray to God direct?
Not always.
The same answer applies here as in the case of prayers to the Virgin Mary, who
after all is the greatest of the Saints. God may wish to give certain
favors through the intercession of some given Saint. In such a case, it
is better to seek the intercession of that Saint as God wishes. I can
decide to give you a gift myself, or to do so through a friend. In the
latter case you do me greater honor by accepting it from my friend than by
refusing my way of giving it to you, and insolently demanding it directly from
myself in person.
64.
64. I pray that
you may see the futility of praying to Saints who can do nothing for you.
Christ is the only Mediator.
By your very
prayer you are attempting to mediate between God and myself on my behalf.
I do not criticize the principle of praying for others. I believe in
that. But I do criticize your praying for me in violation of your own
principles. If the Saints cannot be mediators by praying for me, nor can
you. Your prayers would be futile; they could do nothing for me; and you
would be wasting your time.
65.
65. When did God
tell anyone to pray to human beings?
When the
Catholic Church teaches us that prayer to the Saints is right and useful, it is
God teaching us that truth through His Church. But the doctrine is
clearly enough indicated in Scripture also. I have mentioned Abraham's
prayer for Sodom. Gen. 18:20. The Jews asked Moses to go to speak
to God on their behalf. God Himself said to Eliphaz, the Themanite,
"My wrath is kindled against thee. . . . but my servant Job shall pray for
you. His face I will accept that folly be not imputed to you."
Job 42:8. Earlier in that same book we read, "Call now if there will
be any that will answer thee, and turn to some of the Saints." Job
5:1. His enemies meant that Job was too wicked to be heard, but they knew
that it was lawful to invoke the Saints. Long after the death of
Jeremiah, Onias said of that prophet, "This is the lover of his brethren
and of the people of Israel. This is he that prayeth much for the people
and for all the holy city; Jeremiah, the prophet of God." 2 Mach.
15:14. St. James says that "prayer of a just man availeth
much." 5:16. If his prayer is valuable, it is worth while to
ask his prayers. If you say, "Yes. That is all right whilst a
man is still in this life and on earth," I ask whether you think he has
less power when in Heaven with God? In Rev. 8:4, St. John says that he
saw "the prayers of the Saints ascending up before God from the hand of an
angel." If I can ask my own mother to pray for me whilst she is
still in this life, surely I can do so when she is with God! She does not
know less when she rejoices in the Vision of God; she has not less interest in
me; and she is not less charitably disposed towards me then. We Catholics
believe in the Communion of Saints, and are in communion with them. But
for you the doctrine of the Apostles' Creed, "I believe in the Communion
of Saints," must be a meaningless formula. Christ is not
particularly honored by our ignoring those who loved and served Him best, and
whom He loves so much.
66.
66. The Lord's
Prayer shows that God Himself hears our prayers.
Correct.
And He hears the prayers we address to the Saints, and their prayers also on
our behalf And those prayers, added to our own, give us additional claims to be
heard by God in a favorable way.
67.
67. By what
authority does the Catholic Church make Saints?
The decree of
canonization does not make a Saint. It simply declares infallibly that a
given person has lived such a holy life with the help of God's grace that he is
a Saint. When someone like a Francis of Assisi lives such a holy life
that all people are compelled to admire it, the Church is often asked to say
whether such a person is worthy to be honored publicly as a Saint. The
Church then carefully collects all possible information, and, after due
consideration, says yes or no. If the Church says yes, the name of the
person to be venerated is put into the Canon or catalogue of those who have
become Saints by their heroic lives of virtue. The Church has the authority
of Christ for these decisions, for He sent her with His authority to teach all
nations in matters of faith and morals, and she could not tell us officially
that a given person was a perfect model of Christian virtue if such a person
were not.
68.
68. Who has the
final say as to whether a soul deserves canonization?
The Pope.
Before he defines that a given soul is indeed a Saint, the advocates of their
cause must prove that the person in question exercised all Christian virtue in
a heroic degree-supreme faith, hope, and charity; perfect prudence, justice,
fortitude, and temperance. Also God's own testimony by proven miracles
wrought through the person's intercession is required. The infallibility
of the Church in such decisions is, as I have said, but an application of
ordinary infallibility in matters of faith and morals, in so far as the Church
could not err in proposing a given life as an exemplification of perfect
Christian virtue.
69.
69. How does the
Church know that those she calls Saints are in Heaven?
With the
assistance of the Holy Spirit, she can and does know. She knows God, and
knows what holiness is. She examines the life of the holy person, and
says that such a life certainly could not lead a soul to Hell. The Church
canonizes only those whose heroic virtue has been proved. And perfect
charity before death destroys all sin, and all punishment due to sin.
There is no place where such a soul could be, save in Heaven. Also
miracles wrought by God in honor of such a one are His guarantee.
70.
70. Why does the
Church allot different duties to different Saints?
She does
not. She asks the special protection and intercession of certain Saints
in special circumstances; and this is based upon what we know of their
particular interest whilst they were on earth, or upon favors obtained already
through their intercession since their death.
71.
71. Why do
Catholics worship relics of Saints?
They do not
worship relics as they worship God, by adoration. If you mean worship in
the sense of honor or veneration, then Catholics certainly venerate the relics
of Saints. The law, "Honor thy father and thy mother," extends
to their persons, body and soul; to their reputations, and to all connected
with them. We reverence their remains even after death. And if we
are not to venerate the remains and relics of the Saints who have been so
entirely consecrated to God, are we to desecrate them? Or are we to be
blandly indifferent to them as to the bleached bones of some dead animal lying
in the fields? The Catholic doctrine, forbidding adoration, yet
commanding respect and veneration, is the only possible Christian conduct.
72.
72. I don't
object to that kind of veneration. I object to the expecting of favors
through relics.
No real
difficulty in this matter. No one holds that material relics of
themselves possess any innate talismanic value. But God Himself can
certainly grant favors even of a temporal nature through the relics of Saints,
thus honoring His Saints, and rewarding the faith and piety of some given
Catholic. St. Matthew tells us that the diseased came to Christ.
"And they besought Him that they might touch but the hem of His
garment. And as many as touched were made whole." Matt.
14:36. Again we read of a woman who touched the hem of Christ's garment
and who was cured. "And Jesus, knowing in Himself the virtue that
had proceeded from Him, said: "Who has touched my
garments." Mk. 5:30. You may reply that these incidents
concerned Christ, and that, whilst He was still living in this world. But
that does not affect the principle that God can grant temporal favors through
inanimate things. And if you look up 2 Kings 13:21, in your own
Protestant version of the Bible, you will find that a dead man, who was being
buried in the sepulchre of Elisha, was restored to life the moment his body
came into contact with the bones of that great prophet of God. In the
Acts of the Apostles, too, we read of a most Catholic, and most un-Protestant
procedure. "God wrought by the hand of Paul more than common
miracles. So that even there were brought from his body to the sick, handkerchiefs
and aprons, and the diseases departed from them." Acts
19:11-12. But you will notice that it was God who wrought these
miracles. And we Catholics say that God can quite easily do similar
things even in our own days. As a matter of historical fact, He has
wrought such things throughout the course of the ages within the
Catholic Church.
73.
73. Are not
relics received and venerated without a particle of proof that they are
genuine?
No. The
Catholic Church is very prudent in this matter, and her law declares that those
relics alone may be publicly venerated which have authentic documents
accompanying them, and proving them to be genuine. These documents can be
given only by one authorized by the Holy See to grant them. If the
documents be lost, no relic may be offered for public veneration by the
faithful without a special decree from a Bishop who can guarantee the relic as
genuine. But even should a Catholic venerate as a relic some object which
is not authentic, such veneration is at least well meant, and directed towards
the one whom the object is believed to represent.
74.
74. Why are
Catholic Churches decorated with images and statues, in direct violation of the
Second Commandment?
The Second
Commandment is, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in
vain." Protestants, of course, call that the Third
Commandment. But they are wrong in doing so, having taken that part of
the first commandment which refers to images as the second of God's
commandments. But do those words forbid the making of
images? They do not. God was forbidding idolatry, not the making of
images. He said, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image of
anything in the Heaven above, or in the earth beneath. Thou shalt not bow
down to them nor worship them." God deliberately adds
those last words, yet you ignore them. He forbids men to make images in
order to adore them. But He does not forbid the making of
images. You will find the commandments given in Exodus, 20. But in
that same Book, 25:18, you will find God ordering the Jews to make images of
Angels! Would you accuse God of not knowing the sense of His own
law? He says, "Thou shalt make also two <BCHERUBIMS< b>of
beaten gold, on the two sides of the oracle." In other words, the
Jews were to make images of things in the Heaven above. And if your
interpretation be true, why do you violate God's law by making images of things
in the earth beneath? Why images of generals and politicians in
our parks? Why photographs of friends and relatives? On your theory
you could not even take a snapshot of a gum tree. You would be making an
image of a thing in the earth beneath. You strain at a gnat and swallow a
camel! This is the fruit of your private interpretation of
Scripture. No, God does not forbid the making of images; He forbids the
making of images in order to adore them.
75.
75. I have seen
more idols in Catholic Churches than sincere Christians.
You have never
seen an idol in a Catholic Church. An image is an idol only when
it is the object of divine worship. You have seen images in
Catholic Churches, but every Catholic knows that divine worship cannot be
offered to such images. Would you call the Statue of Liberty in New York
harbor, an idol? As for your not seeing sincere Christians in a Catholic
Church, you cannot expect to test the sincerity of a Christian by the color of
his tie or the shape of his shoes. Are not the stained glass windows in
your churches images? Are they idols for you? You may not
like images of Christ on a Cross, but you make no bones about singing in
your hymns "in the Cross of Christ we glory." Is there
sense in your singing about the Cross and then rebelling against a real cross?
76.
76. God forbade
us to worship plaster statues as Catholics do; yet you send missionaries to
convert heathens who do the same thing.
God absolutely
forbids us to worship wooden and stone statues, and Catholics are not so
foolish as to commit so serious a sin. But Catholics do honor
representations of those who are in Heaven, just as we all honor our dead
soldiers by tributes of respect to the Cenotaph. If I lift my hat to the
flag of my country as I pass the memorial to our dead soldiers, am I honoring
the cloth or the stone, or what it stands for? If it be lawful in
that case, it is certainly lawful to honor the memorials of the dead heroes
of Christianity, the Saints. Our missionaries go to heathen tribes to
save them from the idolatrous worship of manmade gods.
77.
77. I have seen
Catholics on their knees adoring and praying to statues in their churches.
You have
not. You have seen Catholics kneeling at prayer, and perhaps kneeling
before an image of Christ, or of Our Lady. But if you concluded that they
were praying to the statues that was not the fault of the
Catholics. It was your own fault in so far as you judged them according
to your own preconceived ideas. Without bothering to ask for information,
you guessed and guessed wrongly. Before an image of Mary, Catholics may
go on their knees and pray to God through the intercession of that Mother of
Christ whom the statue represents. But you have no right to accuse
them of praying to the statue. Were you to kneel down by your bedside at
night for a last prayer, could you be regarded as adoring or praying
to your mattress?
78.
78. But I have
seen a Catholic kiss the feet of a statue of Christ.
If I kiss the photograph
of my mother, am I honoring a piece of cardboard? Or is it a tribute of
love and respect offered to my mother? A Catholic reverences images and
statues only in so far as they remind him of God, of Christ, or of Our
Lady and the Saints. Where a pagan adores and worships a thing of wood in
itself, I kiss the cross, not because it is a piece of wood, but because it
stands for Christ and for His sufferings on my behalf. And I am
sure that Our Lord looks down from Heaven and says, "Bless the child; he
at least appreciates My love for him." Your mistake is that you try to
judge interior dispositions from exterior conduct - a dangerous policy always.
79.
79. Catholics
raise their hats when passing a church; why not when passing statues in a
Catholic store window?
The Catholic
who raises his hat when passing a Catholic Church does so as an act of reverence
for the Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. But Christ is not thus
present in stores selling Catholic articles of devotion. But of course
you missed the point, and took it for granted that Catholic men lift their hats
because statues are present in the Church. Then you concluded that they
ought to do so when they see statues in a store window.
80.
80. If the use
of statues is all right, why did the Catholic Church cut out the Second
Commandment?
You are asking
an impossible question. You might as well ask me, "Why has China
declared war on Afghanistan?" No man could answer that question,
because there is no answer to it. He could only reply, "Tell me
first, are you under the impression that China has declared war on Afghanistan?"
And if you replied in the affirmative, he would proceed to correct your
notions. Had you but asked me, "Did the Catholic Church cut out
the Second Commandment?" a reply could have been given at once. She
certainly did not do so.
81.
81. The
Protestant Bible gives the Second Commandment as referring to images. But
the Catholic Catechism gives it as referring to taking the name of God in vain,
omitting the reference to images.
Even the
Protestant Bible does not give the Second Commandment as referring to images,
though Protestants are usually taught that those words in the First Commandment
which refer to images constitute a Second Commandment.
82.
82. The Roman
Church omits the Second Commandment, and then breaks up the tenth into two, in
order to avoid having only nine.
The reverse is
the case. Protestants make the First Commandment into two, and then, to
escape having eleven, turn the ninth and tenth into one! The First
Commandment, as given in the Bible, is as follows: "I am the Lord
thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage. Thou shalt not have strange Gods before me. Thou shalt not
make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of anything that is in Heaven
above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters
under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them. I am
the Lord thy God, etc." Exodus 20:1-6.
83.
83. You are
deceiving us. That is not what Catholics are taught. I have a
Catholic Catechism which gives the First Commandment as, "I am the Lord
thy God; thou shalt not have strange Gods before me." You cut out
the reference to images.
In the first
place, if we wished to deceive our people, we would be very foolish to give
them the full wording of the Commandment in the Douay Version of the Bible,
where they could detect the deliberate distortion! In the second place,
in the Catechism we give the full substantial sense of the words I have quoted,
but in a brief and summarized form which can be easily memorized.
84.
84. And you deny
that you have changed the Commandment.
I do. You
notice words only, paying little or no attention to the legal substance
of those words. To simplify the wording whilst retaining the full sense
is certainly not to change the Commandment. If you say, "He is under
an obligation not to give expression to his thoughts at the present
moment." I do not change the substance of what you say if I repeat
to some small child, "He must not speak now." The First
Commandment contains within its involved Hebrew amplification two essential
points: that we must acknowledge the true God, and that we must avoid
false gods. Those two essential points are put briefly and simply in the
Catechism for children who are more at home with short and easy sentences.
85.
85. The
Commandments do not require such alteration.
The
commandments do not. But the hopeless tangle most Protestants get
into where this First Commandment is concerned shows clearly that it needs to
be stated precisely, without any substantial alteration. It is not a
question of words, but it is a question of law, and Catholic children at
least know and can clearly state the law.
86.
86. You are
violating the text of Scripture. The reference to images is a separate
verse.
The numbering
of the verses affords no argument. There was no numerical
distinction of verses in the original Scriptures. Nor did God reveal such
distinctions. All who are acquainted with the subject know that Scripture
was divided into verses by men some centuries after Christ for greater
convenience. The method of dividing the commandments, however, is not
of very great importance. The complaints of Protestants against the
Catholic division are rather like that of some modern daughter who would want
to spell her name Smyth, and complains that her mother spells it Smith.
But the mother knows best how it should be written, and the mother Church knows
best how the Commandments should be numbered.
87.
87. I am
interested in Catholic worship. Christ was poor and humble. Yet
Catholic ceremonial is full of pomp and display. Does your religion teach
humility?
Yes. We
are taught to be humble. And Christian humility orders a man to be
unassuming and gentle. But it does not forbid a man to worship God as
befits God. In fact, the more humble a man is, the more he magnifies and
glorifies God, and depreciates self. The Catholic Church says, "God
certainly deserves the best we can give Him. Whatever else we may do, let
us not be mean in anything where God is concerned. We personally deserve
very little, and if by our gifts God's worship is magnificent and we the
poorer, that is how it should be." Christ Himself commended the poor
widow for giving all she had to the Temple. Yet he was the one who taught
humility.
88.
88. Is it not
opposed to the simplicity of His principles?
No.
Christ was God, and in the Old Testament God dictated a ceremonial every bit as
lavish as Catholic ceremonial. So that it cannot be against His
principles. And Christ never condemned ceremonial. He instituted
the ceremonial of Baptism with water. With ceremony He breathed upon the
Apostles when giving them the power to forgive sins. He came to fulfill
the law, not to destroy it. But above all, He founded His Church, giving
into her care the guardianship of His religion, and conferring upon her the
power to regulate its worship. Whatever the Church has sanctioned in this
matter she has done in virtue of the commission given her by her Founder.
89.
89. The
ceremonial of the Church shows a great change since the time of Christ.
You won't find
the leaves of an oak tree wrapped up inside an acorn. Christ sowed the
seed, and said that the small seed He planted would grow into a vast
tree. Such growth supposes external changes without loss of
identity. Because an acorn has no branches or foliage, will you deny its
identity with the tree into which it grows?
90.
90. The Last
Supper had no elaborate ceremonial rites, yet look at the Mass today.
The essential
rites of the Mass are exactly the same as those of the Last Supper. Remember
that before the simple Last Supper Christ had fulfilled the full ceremonial of
the Jewish Feast. He ceremoniously washed the disciples' feet. And
the growth of the surrounding rites in the Mass has been in accordance with
principles dictated by God to the Jews, and by the actions of Christ throughout
His public ministry, when He used so many ceremonies in the miracles He worked.
91.
91. Why do
priests vest so elaborately when going to say Mass?
In Exodus
28:2-3, we read of God's prescriptions of the vestments befitting the dignity
of His religion. "Thou shalt make a holy vesture for Aaron thy
brother; for glory and for beauty. And thou shalt speak to all the wise
of heart, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom: that they may make
Aaron's vestments, in which he being consecrated may minister to me. And
these shall be the vestments that they shall make." Throughout the
rest of the chapter God deigns to give the most minute directions as to the
various vestments Aaron was to use. Not for a moment would Christ have
condemned the principle of vestments after such a sanction by the infinitely
wise God. He would be contradicting Himself. There can be nothing
wrong with vestments in principle.
92.
92. Christ
dressed with the utmost simplicity and talked to God in the most humble places.
Priests also
dress with simplicity. They are not always in vestments. As for
Christ, He, too, went to the Temple, and took part in its worship, never
condemning its ritual. With the establishment of His own Church in
fulfillment of the Old Law, He ordained His own priests after the Order of
Melchisedech in place of the Levitical Priesthood, and left it to the Church to
regulate the ceremonial surrounding the substantial form of worship He had
prescribed. As I have said, He would have been the last to condemn a
dignified ceremonial, and Anglican Protestants of the High Church group are
rapidly trying to resume the vestments prescribed by the Catholic Church,
vestments their forefathers so eagerly got rid of, mistakenly, now say the High
Church Anglicans.
93.
93. Why the
proud display of processions such as those of Eucharistic Congresses?
There is
nothing wrong with processions. Christ entered Jerusalem with a
procession of the populace crying Hosanna, waving palms and strewing their
garments on the roadway, making it as elaborate as they could. And He
rebuked those who would have prevented it. Remember that Eucharistic
Congresses are not in honor of ourselves, but of Christ, and love of Him
suggests that nothing can be too good for Him.
94.
94. When I think
of the expense, I think too of the poor, and ask why so much money should be
wasted.
Such an
objection recalls the words of Judas, "Why was it not sold and given to
the poor?" Jn. 12:5. In any case, the lavish generosity of the
Catholic Church in the worship of God does not interfere with her work for the
poor. She is the most active of all Churches in that work. No other
Church has so many institutions, hospitals, homes, and orphanages; and in many
parishes there is a weekly distribution of money and food to the poor through
the St. Vincent de Paul or some other society.
95.
95. The
ritual of the Roman Church is intricate, mysterious, and sensual, whilst the
Gospel is simplicity itself.
The ritual of
the Catholic Church is not intricate, save to those who are unfamiliar with
it. It is certainly symbolical of many mysteries "hidden from the
ages and generations, but now manifested." 1 Col. 1:26. It
also involves sensible and visible rites, but in no sense can it be called
sensual.
96.
96. Is it not
blasphemy to use mingle mangle in baptizing children?
It would
be. But no mingle mangle occurs in the baptism of children. Mingle
mangle means a meaningless jumble of formulas. But every least item in
the baptismal rite is full of meaning and significance. And it is to
God's honor and glory to use the holy ceremonies instituted by the Church of
Christ with the authority of Christ. Was it mingle mangle when Christ
touched the blind man's eyes with spittle before curing him?
97.
97. I went to a
Requiem Mass, and was highly amused at the antics of the Priest with his gabble
and mumble.
That you were
highly amused at a Requiem Mass which you did not understand only proves that
you are devoid of the power to sympathize with what is sacred to other
people. Had you understood it, and then been amused, there might have
been some excuse. You say that the whole ceremony was a gabble and a
mumble to you. Were you to attend a session of the German parliament in
Berlin, you would probably say the same. "But then," you will
reply, "I am not a German. It was all right for them. I knew
that well enough, and was not amused, because they were not talking my
language, and because it is to be expected that their ways would differ from my
ways." So I say in turn, "You are not a Catholic. Every
Catholic understands a Requiem Mass. But you should have known that a
Protestant would not be likely to understand a Catholic ceremony. That
would have checked your amusement. I am a Catholic. But I have
never felt like ridiculing the religious services of sincere Protestants.
98.
98. Why does the
Catholic Church surround death with gloom, offering the Mass in black
vestments, and everything so sad and solemn?
The Catholic
Church does not surround death with gloom. But her liturgy is in keeping
with man's nature as God intended it to be. Despite all spiritual joy and
consolation, whilst hearts are human they break. Even God does not expect
us to be hard and inhuman, unmoved when some dear one is taken from us.
Our Lord wept with those who mourned the death of Lazarus. And He knew
that He was going to bring him back to life again! It is natural to man
to find relief in expressing his feelings. St. Paul says, "Be not sorrowful
as those who have no hope." But he does not say, "Be not
sorrowful." In fact he tells Christians to comfort one
another. We do not go up to a man who has just lost his mother, and
congratulate him, our faces beaming with joy. That would be inhuman, and
the Catholic Church is never inhuman. Near relatives instinctively wear
mourning, and dress in black when a loved one dies. Very close friends do
the same. And the Catholic Church is the dearest friend any Catholic has,
a friend who identifies herself with his feelings in his great loss. It
is all in keeping with what is best in man. Death is a solemn thing, and
the Catholic Church treats it with solemnity. She does not ask us to
sorrow as those who have no hope, but she will not turn a funeral into a
wedding feast, and ignore genuine and deep sorrow as if we were so spiritual
that we had ceased to be human. We are not in heaven yet.
99.
99. Cathedrals
costing thousands are nothing to God. He is a Spirit, and would love just
as much without the earthly show.
But man would
not love so much! You fail to grasp a fundamental point. It takes
two to make a religion, God and Man. God is a pure Spirit, but man is
not. Man is a composite of the spiritual and the material. And he
must worship God according to his twofold nature. Man not only possesses
spiritual thoughts; he gives them expression in speech, writing, music, art and
architecture. And, where God is concerned, he dedicates all these things
to God's service in religion. God Himself ordered the Jews to do so, commanding
the erection of the glorious Temple at Jerusalem. God wants the service,
not of half our being, but of our complete being.
100.
100.
In Europe I found glorious Cathedrals and pitiable poverty side by
side.
The present-day
poverty is not due to the Cathedrals which were built long ago by others, who
gave their time and services as a voluntary offering to God. The poverty
due to modern industrial conditions should not be attributed to buildings
erected in other and happier ages. Meantime those beautiful Cathedrals do
no harm to men. If the poor pulled them down stone by stone, they could
not eat the stones. And even if they could sell them for thirty pieces of
silver, the relief would be of a very temporary nature. Believe me,
future generations would be just as poor temporally, and much poorer
spiritually, with no inspiring Cathedrals.
101.
101.
Does crawling up the Scala Santa at Rome on one's knees help save
one's soul?
The Scala
Santa, or Holy Staircase, consists of twenty-eight marble steps. They are
said to have been brought to Rome from Jerusalem by St. Helena, the mother of
Constantine, in 326 A. D. At Jerusalem they led up to the one-time court
of Pilate, and the feet of Jesus had trodden them as He went down to be
crucified by men. With no idea that such an act will of itself save his
soul, the Catholic ascends them on his knees out of reverence for Christ, and
you have not much reverence and love for Him if you ridicule such a
tribute. We Catholics, after all, believe that He is God. We are
quite prepared to kiss the very ground whereon He stood. The Pharisees
once ridiculed a woman who went on her knees and washed His feet with her
tears. But Christ justified her act of loving reverence. Cold Protestantism
will never understand the warm-hearted love of Catholicism for the Person of
Christ and of all connected with Him. I do not belong to the emotional
and demonstrative Latin race. I do not live in the middle ages. I
do not suppose I would be ranked as illiterate. Yet whilst in Rome I
myself ascended those same stairs on my knees, and I experience no flush of
shame as I say so. I have seen a Protestant kiss the pages of the
Gospel. He kissed a printed sheet of paper. I admired him for it,
and so would you, for we know what it meant to him. I certainly would not
ridicule him and ask him sarcastically whether he thought that the smearing of
his lips on a piece of paper could help to save his soul! Yet such a
remark would be similar to that of a Protestant who suggests that Catholics
believe they can be saved by crawling up a staircase on their knees.
However you would not have asked such a question had you realized the nature of
the subject and the motives prompting such reverence for Christ.
IMPRIMATUR: Joannes Gregorius
Murray Archiepiscopus Sancti Pauli.
Written by Fr. Chas. M.
Carty, Rev. Dr. L. Rumble, M.S.C.
Copyright 1976 by TAN Books and Publishers, Inc.
Originally published by
Fathers Rumble and Carty Radio Replies Press, Inc.
St. Paul, Minn., U.S.A.
Copies of
this article available from:
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Next:
Here is the text of the one on Purgatory:
IMPRIMATUR:
Joannes Gregorius Murray Archiepiscopus Sancti Pauli.
Written
by Fr. Charles M. Carty Rev. Dr. Leslie Rumble, M.S.C. Copyright 1976 by TAN
Books and Publishers, Inc.
Originally
published by Fathers Rumble and Carty Radio Replies Press, Inc. St. Paul,
Minn., U.S.A.
PURGATORY QUIZZES TO A
STREET PREACHER
1. Do the Scriptures speak about praying for the dead?
The Second Book of Machabees tells us that after Judas had defeated Gorgias,
he came to bury the slain Jews. "Making a gathering, he sent twelve
thousand drachmas of silver to Jerusalem for sacri fice to be offered for the
sins of the dead." 2Mach 12:43. Evidently Judas did not regard their sins
to be grievous, for he says, "because he considered that they who had
fallen asleep with godliness had great grace laid up for them." That
praying for the dead was a Jewish practice is manifested in these words: 2Mach
12:45. "It is, therefore, a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the
dead, that they may be loosed from their sins." 2Mach 12:46.
2. But the Books of Machabees are not contained in the Protestant Bible so
why quote it to prove your doctrine?
The reformers rejected these books from the Bible precisely because they
taught the doctrine of pray ing for the dead. If you Protestants deny that the
Books of Machabees are two of the inspired books of the Bible then you must
admit them as historical records of Jewish faith in praying for the dead.
3. Does the New Testament speak of your Purgatory?
Not in name but in fact. Mt. 12:32: "He that shall speak against the
Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world, nor in the world
to come." St. Augustine and St. Gregory gather from these words that some
sins may be remitted in the world to come; and consequently that there is a
Purgatory. St. Paul 1Cor. 3:13-15: "The fire shall try every man’s work of
what sort it is. If any man’s work burn, he shall suffer loss; but he himself
shall be saved, yet so as by fire." St. Paul tells us in these words that
the soul shall be judged, suffer for a time and then be saved. The only place
to suffer for a time before being saved is Purgatory. St. Mt. 5:25-26 speaks of
the Prison, "and thou be cast into Prison. Amen I say to thee, thou shalt
not go out from thence, till thou pay the last farthing."
4. Did the early Christians believe in Purgatory?
The tombs of the martyrs and the catacombs are filled with definite evidence
to prove that the early Christians certainly believed in Purgatory. On their
tombs we read: "In your prayers remember us who have gone before
you." "Mayest thou have eternal light in Christ." Tertullian
(160-240) speaks of anniversary Masses for the dead: "We make on one day
every year ablations for the dead, as for their birthdays." "The
faithful widow ... offers prayers on the anniversary of his death." St.
Monica just before dying made this request of her son St. Augustine: "Lay
this body anywhere; let not the care of it in any way disturb you. This only I
request of you, that you would remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever
you be." St. Augustine then petitions, . . . "And inspire, . . . that
as many shall read these words may remember at Thy Altar, Monica, Thy
servant." Hence no sane student of history can deny the fact of this
universal custom of the early Church, i.e., of praying for the dead because she
believed in Purgatory.
5. Did the Jews believe in Purgatory?
Certainly the Jews believed in offering prayers and sacrifice for their
departed friends and relatives and they still believe in this custom for they
are found always at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. In their liturgy for
funerals of Hebrews the prayers for the dead read as though they were Catholic
prayers for the dead.
6. Did Luther believe in Purgatory?
No. Fr. Conway in "Question Box," says, "Luther’s false
theory of justification by faith alone led him to deny the distinction between
mortal and venial sin, the fact of temporal punishment, the necessity of good
works, the efficacy of indulgences, and the usefulness of prayers for the dead.
If sin is not remitted but only covered; if the ‘New Man’ of the Gospel is
Christ imputing His own justice to the still sinful man, it would indeed be
useless to pray for the dead that they be loosed from their sins. Luther’s denial
of Purgatory implied either the cruel doctrine that the greater number of even
devout Christians were lost, which accounts in some measure for the modern
denial of eternal punishment, or the unwarranted assumption that God by ‘some
sudden, magical change’ purifies the soul at the instant of death.
"Protestant prayers for the dead, if ever they pray for the dead, are a
waste of time and are meaningless unless they admit a Purgatory.
7. Christ sent the good thief immediately into Paradise. I don’t see the
need of your Purgatory.
The good thief gained Paradise immediately because of his perfect contrition
and anyone dying in the state of contrition that is judged perfect by God
immediately merits Heaven. Whether our contrition is perfect or imperfect depends
on God’s judgment. The Book of Wisdom (7:25) declares that "nothing
defiled cometh" into the presence of the Spirit of Wisdom. St. John in the
Apocalypse describes the new Jerusalem and says (21:27), "There shall not
enter into it anything defiled." This means that souls must be purified of
slight blemishes of venial sins which involve temporal punishment still to be
suffered. Common sense tells us that some are not worthy to enter at once into
Heaven and that they are not bad enough to be doomed to hell. There must,
therefore be an intermediate state where the soul is cleansed of its
defilement. It is contrary to nature not to, pray for the departed friend or
relative. The instinct of nature creates a hope that every thing is all right
with the departed, and, if not, there is found a latent urge to help with
prayer and sacrifice. Purgatory robs death of its terrors. When the Reformers
denied this doctrine they drove a stiletto into the Scriptures and the unbroken
tradition of the Christian Church. They choked and stifled the inherent
cravings of our hearts. If I can pray for my mother when she is alive then why
not when she is dead, that she, too, be loosed of her sins? Can we not then
hear the cry of Job: "Have pity on me, have pity on me, at least you my
friends, because the hands of the Lord hath touched me." Job 19:21.
Tennyson gives testimony to the natural yearning of the human heart and to the
Christian tradition, when he writes: "I have lived my life, and that which
I have done May He within Himself make pure; but thou, If thou shouldst never
see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than
this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me
night and day."
8. I am interested in your dogma concerning Purgatory. Must I be a Catholic
before I can understand that invention of your Church.
No. You must be a non-Catholic to suspect that the Church did invent it. The
idea that there is no Purgatory is the invention of Protestants. The Reformers
corrupted the true doctrine, and many good Protestants, realizing this, are
returning to the Catholic religion of their forefathers. Meantime, if I could
discover, or you could show me when and where the Church invented this
doctrine, I promise to spend the rest of my life exposing the Catholic Church
as a merely human institution making outrageous claims upon men.
9. Why make people afraid of such a horrible place as Purgatory, when you
know that it does not exist?
I know that it does exist. And if you deny it be-cause to you it seems a
horrible place, you must deny hell also because it is far more horrible. And if
you deny hell, you deny Christianity. And is it not a more horrible thought
that there would be no Purgatory? In that case you would have but Heaven and hell.
All not quite fit for Heaven could not hope to escape hell. It is a much more
pleasant thought that there are people not quite good enough for Heaven, yet
not had enough for hell, and that these are sent to Purgatory until they are
purified sufficiently for Heaven.
10. What is the nature of your doctrine on Purgatory?
It can be summed up very briefly. At death the soul of man, if quite fit,
goes at once to Heaven; if not quite fit, to Purgatory; if quite unfit, to
hell. The soul which has repented of all its sins, and has fully expiated them
in this life, is quite fit for Heaven at once. The soul which departs this life
in a state of unrepented mortal sin can never be fitted for Heaven, and goes to
hell. But a soul which has sincerely repented of its sins, yet has not fully
expiated them, secures immunity from hell by repentance, and goes to Purgatory
until it has expiated all its deficiencies.
11. Does God want to roast you merely because you have the misfortune to be
alive?
He knows that you had no say in the matter. God does not want to roast me.
It is not a misfortune to be alive, though it is blame-worthy to have misused
one’s existence. Nor did I want a say as to whether I should receive the gift
of existence. People can leave me a fortune tomorrow without consulting me. But
I did have a say in my infidelities to God’s grace, and for that I am
responsible and do not wish to excuse myself.
12. Have you been so atrociously wicked as to deserve Purgatory?
There is no need to be atrociously wicked in order to need purification, any
more than there is need to be on your deathbed before you need medicine. But
there is need to attain to a high standard of purity and holiness before one
could be fit to enter the glory of God’s presence.
13. Do Protestants go to Purgatory?
All who die in the charity of Christ whether they have known Him or not
escape hell. If they are not good enough to enter Heaven they go to Purgatory.
Between souls united to Christ in Heaven and on earth and in Purgatory there
flourishes a most intimate relation. We ask each other’s prayers on earth; we
do not believe that our holiest and best lose their power to pray for us merely
because they have been transferred to Heaven, so we often ask them to continue
so doing. In the Communion of Saints we have the Church Triumphant assisting
the Church Militant, and the Church Militant by prayers and indulgences
assisting the Church Suffering. Hence you see that the Church has nothing to do
with hell. But she has a very intimate connection with both Purgatory and
Heaven. The Church has nothing to do with hell, because it is no use praying
for those who are in hell and there is no need to pray for those who are safely
in Heaven, it is obvious that there is a place of temporal suffering, or
purification, or purgation-Purgatory. Since Protestants admit only a Heaven and
a Hell it is absurd and useless for them to pray for the dead.
14. Would God destine so good a man as George Washington for Purgatory just
because he was not a Catholic?
Purgatory is not a final destiny. Every soul that goes there is saved, and
is ultimately admitted to the very Vision of God. Good Protestants as well as
good Catholics will go there if they are not quite perfect at death. There is
no dispensation. And where is the man who has not his imperfections?
15. A man has every chance to repent in this life.
He has. And if he does not, he will not even go to Purgatory if his sins be
grave. Purgatory is not a place for repentance, but for purification. If two
men repent on their deathbeds, one of whom broke one commandment and the other,
all the commandments often, both are saved by their repentance. But they are
not both equal before God. They will suffer relative purifications in
Purgatory.
16. This dogma of Purgatory was invented by Pope Gregory in 600 A.D., and
was made an article of faith by the Council of Florence in 1439.
If not invented until 600 A.D., why did St. Monica, in the fourth century,
implore her son St. Augustine, as she lay on her dying bed, that he would pray
for her soul whenever he went to the Altar to offer the Mass? And how would you
account for the inscriptions in the catacombs recording prayers for the dead
offered by the Christians of the first centuries? Or, if you would go back
earlier, what will you do with the teaching of Scripture itself. The Council of
Florence merely recalled previous definitions.
17. What is your Romish reply to the challenge of Article XXII in the Book
of Common Prayer?
That Article of the Church of England says that the Romish doctrine of
Purgatory is grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but is rather repugnant to
the Word of God. The reply is that the Article is quite erroneous, and that
many Anglicans realize the fact. Thus an Anglican clergyman unsays that Article
definitely in this book entitled, "The Catholic Religion: A Manual of
Instruction for Members of the Church of England." He speaks of a place of
mercy "provided in the intermediate state, in which evil will be
completely purged. When this purification is accomplished, such souls enter
into perfect peace," p. 193. On the following page he suggests that, at
the Reformation, men were too eager and rejected much that was true - including
the intermediate state. In no less than six different places he urges prayer
for the dead just as Catholics pray for the dead, and, as he shows from
Scripture, both the Jews and St. Paul prayed for the departed. On p. 379, he
writes, "Still more desirable is the celebration of the Holy Eucharist for
the repose of the soul of the departed." Thus this Anglican clergyman goes
back to the Romish doctrine of Purgatory. I am not quoting from a book
unacceptable to the many. My copy is of the 19th edition, completing 207
thousand.
18. How can an Anglican clergyman who has sworn to accept the articles of
Religion, teach such doctrine?
I do not see how he can do so. Romish theologians are simple children
compared with the capacity for mental gymnastics manifested by Rev. Vernon
Staley, the author of the book, in his efforts to salve his conscience. He says
in effect that the doctrine of Purgatory is all right, but that Anglicans must
not use the word Purgatory. He admits the thing but not its terminology. He
calls it a place or process of cleansing, but he will not call it Purgatory,
which means the same thing. It is as if we Catholics had invented the word
theatre. Then this exponent of Anglicanism would insist upon using the word
playhouse, and swear that he did not agree with the Catholic Church concerning
houses of entertainment. In substance he declares Article XXII to be false and
unscriptural.
19. You speak of Scripture, but the Bible mentions only Heaven and hell.
It does not. It certainly mentions an intermediate state to which the soul
of Christ went after His death on the cross. 1Pet. 3:19. This state was neither
Heaven nor hell, but the Limbo of the Fathers of the Old Law. In addition to
this, Scripture mentions the purgatorial state. In any case, it would not
matter if the Bible did mention but two places. My mentioning only London and
New York could not prove the nonexistence of Paris. It would be a different
matter if Christ had said, "There is no Purgatory." But He did not.
20. How do you prove the existence of such a state?
In Matt. 5:26, Christ, in condemning sin, speaks of liberation only after
expiation in the prison. "Thou shalt not go out from thence till thou
repay the last farthing." In Matt. 12:32, He speaks of sin which
"shall not be forgiven either in this world or in the world to come."
Any remission of the effects of sin in the next world can refer only to
Purgatory. Above all St. Paul tells us that the ray of judgment will try each
man’s work. That day is after death, when the soul goes to meet its God. What is
the result of that judgment? If a man’s work will not stand the test St. Paul
says that "he shall suffer loss; but he himself shall he saved, yet so as
by fire." 1Cor. 3:15. This cannot refer to eternal loss in hell, for no
one is saved there. Nor can it refer to Heaven, for there is no suffering in
Heaven. Purgatory alone can explain this text. As a matter of fact, all
Christians believed in Purgatory until the Reformation, when the Reformers
began their rejection of Christian doctrines at will. Prayer for the dead was
ever the prevailing custom, in accordance with the recommendation of the Bible
itself. "It is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that
they may be loosed from their sins." 2Mach. 12:46. Prayer for the dead
supposes a soul not in Heaven where it does not need the help of prayer, nor in
hell where prayer cannot assist it. Some intermediate state of purification and
need, where prayer can help, is necessary. And the doctrine is most reasonable.
"There shall not enter into the new Jerusalem anything defiled." Apo.
21:27. Yet not all defilement should cost man the loss of his soul. Small
offenses are punished by fines or by temporary imprisonment, after which the
delinquent is liberated. Those who deny Purgatory teach the harder and more unreasonable
doctrine.
21. God would not demand expiation after having forgiven the sin.
What you think God would do or would not do cannot avail against that which
He does do. When David repented of his great sin God sent the prophet Nathan
with the message to him, "The Lord hath taken away thy sin. Nevertheless,
because thou hast given occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, thy
child shall surely die." 2 Sam. 12:14. To forgive the guilt of sin, and
purify the spiritual scar and stain, which that disease of the soul leaves, by
expiatory suffering, is better than to leave the soul still unpurified and
indebted to God’s justice. I, too, could fully forgive a friend his offense
should he have robbed me, yet still insist that he make good the damage he has
wrought me.
22. What is the punishment of Purgatory?
When the soul leaves the body, that which can think, remember, love, hate,
be happy or miserable, has gone from that body. A corpse cannot do these
things. And the soul, with these capabilities, goes into a new state of being
as a separated spirit. And my true self, separated from the distractions of
this world, will perceive clearly and fully its own unfitness for God’s
presence, a perception which will mean unspeakable suffering. The exact nature of
this suffering we do not know, but it is compared in Scripture to the action of
fire afflicting a sensitive body. Although it is not defined as a dogma that
there is a real fire of Purgatory, it is the general opinion of theologians
that there is a real fire somewhat analogous to the fire of hell. However it be
explained, the fact that purgatorial suffering awaits the imperfect has been
revealed by God.
23. When did God make Purgatory?
Heaven, of course, always existed. For where God is, there is Heaven. Hell
was made when the devil and his followers fell from grace. There was no
Purgatory for them. Purgatory, then, was made when men began to sin and die
with sins repented of, but not fully expiated by the sufferings of this life.
Men under the Old Law went to Purgatory just as those do who live under the New
Law.
24. Where is Purgatory?
God has not deigned to satisfy our curiosity on that point, and the
knowledge is not of practical importance to us. The fact that there is a
Purgatory has been revealed by God. And when He reveals a fact, we cannot say
to Him, "Well, I for one refuse to believe it until You tell me more about
it." God proves a thing by saying it, for He is truth itself. We have but
to prove that He said it.
25. How do you know that there are any souls in Purgatory?
I know that 100,000 people die daily. I refuse to believe that they all go
to hell, and feel quite sure that they are not all fit for immediate entry into
Heaven. Moreover, you would find far more difficulty in endeavoring to show
that there are no souls in Purgatory.
26. How do you know that you can help the souls in Purgatory by your
prayers?
God would not have inspired the Jews to pray for the departed if such
prayers were of no avail. Christians have always prayed for the dead, a
practice fully warranted by the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. And if we
can pray for our dear ones who are in trouble in this life, our prayers can
certainly follow them in their future difficulties. All prayer is addressed to
the same God who is as present to the souls of our dear departed as He is to
us.
27. Is your own personal conviction such that you will want others to pray
for you?
It is. All who have the Catholic faith believe in prayer for the dead. It is
not a doctrine for the laity only. And I sincerely hope that friends will pray
for me and have Masses offered on my behalf when God has taken me from this
world. I shall need them. Nothing defiled will enter Heaven, and if at death
one’s soul is not absolutely perfect in virtue proportionately to the grace it
has received, it is defiled by imperfection of some sort. "If we say that
we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." 1Jn.1:8.
Masses and prayers offered for me after my death will help to expiate such
imperfections as I unfortunately possess.
28. So you expect to get redemption on the nod! You are fortunate.
I am. And not a soul will be saved who does not owe it to the death of
Christ on the cross, and who will not admit that this was a purely free and
gratuitous gift wholly undeserved by men. Mass merely applies the satisfactory
value of Christ’s death to my soul. Meantime, those who deny Purgatory and the
necessity to expiation wish to obtain salvation much more "on the
nod," as you call it, than Catholics.
29. Joseph McCabe says that Purgatory is the most lucrative doctrine ever
invented by priests.
He is the last man from whom you should seek information about the Catholic
Church. I am a priest, and know as much about the Catholic Church as Joseph
McCabe ever did. And my judgment is not warped by hatred. The doctrine of
Purgatory was revealed by God. It is not a lucrative doctrine invented for
financial reasons. Popes, Bishops, and priests all believe in it on exactly the
same footing as the faithful, and it is my consolation that many priests have
already promised to offer Mass for me as soon as they hear of my death. And
they will receive nothing for doing so.
30. Yet priests accept offerings for Masses under false pretenses.
They do not. A priest will accept an offering on the understanding that he
will say a special Mass for the intentions of the person making the offering.
In accepting an offering from one person he forfeits the support he would
receive from another in exercising his ministry on that other’s behalf.
31. It is a source of revenue which no priest dare fail to utilize. The
selling of Masses must be most profitable.
That remark shows that you do not understand the nature of Mass offerings at
all. Priests do not sell Masses, and the people do not pay for Masses. The Mass
cannot be bought or sold. Even were I to say that the priest offers the Mass
and is paid, not for the Mass, but for his time and services, any evil element
such as you suggest would be excluded. It matters little whether a chaplain be
given a salary for a year’s service, or a special offering for a special
service. However the explanation is deeper than that. In the Old Law the people
brought tithes and percentages of their goods and dedicated them to God. The
gift was directly made to God, and once given, ceased to belong to the giver
and belonged entirely to God. Then God made use of these gifts for the support
of His religious ministers, inviting them to be His guests. The same spirit
characterizes Catholic practice. A Catholic wishes to offer the sacrifice of
the Mass to God. He is not compelled to do so. Now the Mass is a sacrifice
instituted by Christ, but it supposes the outward necessities, bread, wine,
altar, vestments, and a living human being authorized by God to offer it in the
name of Christ and of the Church. The Catholic offers to God all that is
necessary, and indeed offers a personal sacrifice by contributing towards the
up keep of the altar and towards the very life of the priest who is to stand at
the altar on his behalf. Since he has made this offering to God, the Mass is
applied according to his intention. Thus, when you attack the idea that the
priest sells the Mass to a Catholic, you are not attacking Catholic doctrine or
practice at all.
32. Your harnessing Purgatory to the idea of offerings to God is most
ingenious. So the Church is equal to God?
I do not harness Purgatory to the idea of offerings to God. I give the
simple Catholic explanation, according to the doctrine of Christ as recorded by
St. Paul. "They that serve the altar partake with the altar. So also the
Lord ordained that they who preach the gospel should live by the gospel."
1 Cor. 9:1314. And as a matter of fact Purgatory does not necessarily come into
it. It is a question of offering Mass for any intention whatever. Some Masses
are offered for those we love and who have departed from this world. Nor is the
Church made equal to God. She is but commissioned by God to attend to matters
connected with His due worship. If I wished to give a friend a valuable plant
in his garden, I would not be elevating the gardener to the status of my
friend.
33. How can you as an honest man support the extortion of hard earned money
from the poor?
I could not support extortion, but I can honestly say that only a person
absolutely ignorant of things Catholic could imagine that money is extorted
from the poor for Masses.
34. Don’t priests visit the bereaved and tell them that so many dollars are
required per week for Masses?
No. Catholics are taught the truth from the pulpit in general. They are told
that it is good to have Masses offered for the dead if possible; as indeed it
is. Apart from that, the matter is left to the spontaneous desire of
individuals. And they are never required to have such Masses offered.
35. If you do not extort, you press home the fact that, unless such Masses
are said, the soul of the loved one will remain in Purgatory.
That is not true. There are many ways in which we can help our deceased
relatives and friends, apart from having Masses offered for them. We can offer
our own assistance at Mass, and our Holy Communions; we can offer any prayers
we wish, or our sufferings, and acts of Christian mortification. It is good to
have Mass offered specially for them if possible. But that is not the only way
in which we can help them. Nor has anyone ever maintained that a soul
necessarily remains in Purgatory until Masses shall have been offered.
36. Why don’t priests pray for the souls of the poor without payment of
money which only the rich can afford?
Priests pray every day for the souls in Purgatory without payment of money,
and without any discrimination between the rich and the poor. When someone asks
for a special intercessory Mass, offering the customary stipend, the priest will
comply with the request. But this is in addition to his personal prayers for
the dead.
37. But would they say Masses for the poor?
Thousands of Masses are said every year for the poor by thousands of
priests, when no offering at all is made. As a matter of fact the law of the
Church obliges a parish priest to offer Mass every Sunday and on every Holy Day
of Obligation for his parishioners, excluding all private requests and
offerings And every priest in a spirit of charity, often offers Mass for the special
intentions of poor people who cannot afford any offering.
38. The fact remains that the Catholic Church derives millions from Masses,
as Joseph McCabe points out.
Naturally the offerings of millions of people would amount to millions. That
is to be expected. Nigh a million people in the Twin Cities contribute some
millions yearly for various transport services; but the individual traveler is
not unreasonably burdened, and the officials do not receive exorbitant
remuneration. Your point proves nothing save the numerical strength of the
Catholic Church, four hundred times as numerous throughout the world as the
nigh million population of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
39. So Purgatory has been able to extort millions?
It extorts nothing. The truth revealed by God inspires Catholics to have
Masses offered for their departed friends and relatives. And those Catholics,
who can afford to do so, desire by personal sacrifice to render the offering of
the Sacrifice of the Mass their own special offering to God.
40. From offerings for Masses in England about a quarter of a million is
raked in yearly.
Proportionately to their numbers that averages a penny per week from
individual Catholics, and yields about sixty cents per week to the individual
priest.
41. In the United States it means a sum of between one and two millions a
year.
The margin of difference is rather wide; however, taking the amount as two
millions, for the Catholic population of the United States the average is again
less than ten cents a year from the individual towards the support of priests
from this source. And at McCabe’s maximum, the individual priest would receive
the average income of one dollar per week from such Mass offerings.
42. Setting out the millions at so much per head is unsound, if ingenious.
Not everyone pays, and those who do are made to feel it.
My argument is not unsound. It is unsound to talk of millions without
mentioning the distribution of the sources from which they come. Nor is any
Catholic made to feel that he is paying. In fact, no Catholic is made to pay in
any sense of the word, for there is no obligation to have Masses offered at all
for one’s personal intentions.
43. Can any honest man be proud of all this? The New Testament says that he
who serves the altar should live by the altar. 1Cor. 9:13-14. And certainly the
man who devotes the whole of his life to the welfare of his people can quite
honestly accept a small percentage from the earnings of those to whose welfare
he is devoted. The priest has to live. He is more constantly at his work than
the man who controls a transport system for the convenience of citizens and who
derives his living from the small contributions of those who use those
services. And the priest’s work is more important and more responsible.
Moreover, the average priest barely gets a living, and many have to be
subsidized or they could scarcely live at all.
44. At any rate, has not the soul of a rich man a better chance than the
soul of a poor man?
We cannot make such a comparison. The rich man who provides for the offering
of Masses for the repose of his soul has a better chance of diminishing his
Purgatory than the rich man who makes no such provision.
45. I want my question answered. A rich man leaves $1,000 for Masses for his
soul. A poor man leaves but $ 1. Who has the better chance of entering Heaven?
If both died in a state of unrepented mortal sin, neither of them has any
chance. If both died in a state of grace, both will certainly enter Heaven. All
souls which depart this life in a state of grace will eventually enter Heaven.
However, some souls need more purification in Purgatory than others. The
question, then, is whether the wealthier man will secure the more rapid
purification, and enter Heaven more easily than the poor man. Not necessarily.
The $1 may easily have been the greater generosity relatively than the $1,000.
The dispositions of the poor man could easily have been more pleasing to God
than those of the rich man. The very poverty and suffering of the poor man in
this life was already expiation; so much so that Christ practically says that
Heaven belongs almost by special right to the poor, declaring that the rich
with their life of comfort and self-indulgence will enter Heaven with great
difficulty. The poor man might scarcely need the few Masses he asks, whilst the
rich man, with all his Masses, may have far more to expiate. Then, too, the
departed can benefit by Masses and prayers within certain limits only. Anything
over and above those limits would be applied to other souls. St. Augustine
clearly taught in the fourth century, "There is no doubt that our prayers
can benefit those who so lived as to deserve to be benefited by them." He
recommends sacrifice on their behalf, whether of the altar, or of prayers, or
of almsgiving, adding, "Although they do not benefit all for whom they are
offered, but those only who deserved during life to benefit by them." But
we can safely leave the adjusting of all these things to God.
46. How do priests know when a soul escapes from Purgatory?
Souls do not escape from Purgatory as criminals from jail, or birds from a
cage. When they are sufficiently purified for the vision of God they are
admitted to Heaven. And no one knows when this occurs, unless God gives a
special revelation, a favor we have no right to ask.
47. Then you might he praying for a soul not in Purgatory at all!
That is quite possible. Granted that we believe in Purgatory, that our
prayers can help the dead, and that we do not know for certain whether our dear
ones are emancipated from their purifications or not, we continue praying for
them. We give them, rather than ourselves, the benefit of any doubt. We argue
that our prayers may possibly benefit them, not that they may possibly be
wasted. And we would certainly risk saying too many for them rather than allow
them to run the risk of being deprived of help.
48. On that score, Catholics would go on praying and having Masses said as
long as they live. Quite so. Is it a fault to be generous as long as one lives?
And are such earnest prayers harmful?
I am a priest. My own mother has gone to God. I shall certainly offer Masses
for her as long as I am able to do so and am free from other obligations. If,
long before my death, her purification is finished and she is enjoying the
happiness of Heaven, I know that not a single prayer or Mass will be wasted.
There are other souls in Purgatory, and no Catholic begrudges the application
of his prayers and sacrifices to other souls should his own dear ones have no
need of them.
49. I must confess that I find all this rather baffling.
You are outside Catholicity, and no more under stand the spirit of the
Catholic religion than a man standing outside a Cathedral can discern the
wonderful beauty of the stained glass windows from within. But a reasonable man
would say, "Well, I can hardly expect to perceive the real sense and
design from here. But there must be something in it, and if I cannot enter the
building I must be content to be without an understanding of that window’s real
beauty." But you stand outside the building of Catholic doctrine, stare at
practices you cannot expect to understand from outside, and express
astonishment that you see nothing in them.
50. Purgatory would be a stumbling block for me were I to become a Catholic.
John L. Stoddard whilst in the quest for the sure light of religious truth
received this illuminating letter from a Catholic friend: "There is hardly
a religious system of antiquity in which some similar provision (to Purgatory)
is not found. It was left for the ‘Reformers’ of the sixteenth century to
reject this immemorial dogma of the Church. When they denied the sanctity of
the Mass and many other sacramental features of Catholicism, the doctrine of
Purgatory went with the rest. If the souls of the dead pass instantly into an
eternally fixed state, beyond the efficacy of our intercessions, then all our
requiems, prayers and similar practices are vain. But if, on the contrary, we
believe in the Communion of Saints, that is, in the intercession of the
threefold Church, militant on earth, suffering in Purgatory, and triumphant in
Heaven, then we on earth can influence, and be influenced by, the souls who
have crossed the border. Few, indeed, quit this life in a state of purity and
grace which warrants their immediate entrance into Heaven. Still fewer, let us
hope, are those to whom the blessed refuge of Purgatory, that halfway house of
our dead, is closed. I cannot conceive how Protestants can believe as they do
on this point, nor is it astonishing that their rejection of Purgatory, has
been followed in the case of many, by the elimination of a belief in hell; for
the latter doctrine, taken alone, is monstrous. In fact, all Catholic doctrines
are interdependent; they stand or fall together. You cannot pick stones out of
the arch, and expect humane and beautiful conceptions imaginable. How many
mothers’ aching hearts has it not soothed and comforted with hope for some
dead, wayward son."
51. Was this letter the cause of Stoddard’s quitting Agnosticism for
Catholicism?
It made a powerful appeal and served as one of the stepping stones to the
conversion of this famed lecturer and writer. In his book, "Rebuilding a
Lost Faith," he says this: "The doctrine of the Catholic Church in
reference to Purgatory states that there is such a place, in which souls suffer
for a time, be fore they can be admitted to the joys of Heaven, because they
still need to be cleansed from certain venial sins, infirmities and faults, or
still have to discharge the temporal punishment due to mortal sins, which is as
yet uncancelled, though the lasting punishment of those sins has been forgiven
and re moved through Christ’s atonement. Furthermore, the Church declares, that
by our prayers and by the acceptable sacrifice of the Mass we may still help
those souls, through the merits of Christ. Beyond this statement the Church’s
formal doctrine does not go; but it is not an article of Catholic faith that
there is in Purgatory any material fire. It is generally believed that souls in
Purgatory suffer spiritual anguish from the fact that they then feel acutely,
as they could not do on earth, the perfect happiness from which they are for a
time excluded, while they must also understand the enormity of the sins which
they committed against their Heavenly Father and their Savior."
52. Why should suffering be required to cleanse us?
According to Rev. J. B. McLaughlin, O.S.B., in his book, "Purgatory or
The Church Suffering," we have this answer: "Some have thought of God
as a hard creditor, fixing the tax of pain for every sin or every sinner. But
we must not think that right and wrong are fixed arbitrarily by God; for they
rest on His very nature. Not, it is right that we should suffer for sin, since
God so commands; rather, He commands it because it is right. And in His
goodness He has made us like Himself; giving us light not only to see what is
His will, but also to see to some extent what He sees. Therefore, let us try to
see why it is right that after repenting our sins we must suffer for them. Consider
a spirit, angel or man, that defies God and disobeys His will. Imagine that God
consents to this; treats the rebellious spirit as a welcome friend, as a
fitting companion for the sinless angels and for God Him self. Imagine that God
creates spirits such that they can find eternal and untroubled happiness in
defying their Maker, and can bask unrebuked in His love. Do we not feel at once
that this is not God that we are picturing? That in some way eternal justice
would be violated if these things were possible, and the holiness of God would
be profaned? If God be God, such defyings and rebellion and all unholiness must
be hateful to Him. His very nature requires that all sin shall bring its own
punishment on the sinner. Again, consider the sinner who discovers and realizes
what he has done in defying his Maker. He sees at once that punishment
unthinkable is his due. Only two alternatives seem possible to him: the despair
of devils and of Judas, if he has lost all love for God; or, if he keeps any
root of love, then the wish to suffer to the limits of his nature that in some
way he may acknowledge the majesty and the holiness that he has outraged. To
him comes the gift of hope; the seemingly unbelievable yet certain knowledge
that God’s all-mastering power can so change him from his sin that he shall be
as if he had never sinned. The Magdalen shall dwell unabashed with the spotless
Mother of God; yea, and with God Him self. With this hope to enlighten him, the
sinner sees he is to make an atonement far ampler than he had thought. He will
suffer now, and by his sufferings not only atone to the Majesty he had
insulted; but also will restore to God the servant and friend who seemed lost,
rendering up his own soul new made in the fires of God’s love."
53. What reasons do you give that there should be suffering for sin?
"There are, therefore, two reasons for suffering for sin: first,
atonement to God; and second, the remaking of our souls. And we can see that
suffering for these purposes may well last long. If we look at the suffering
endured to atone to God, there is no reason why it should ever end, except His
mercy. And the remaking of our souls is slow. A wound or sprain is received in
an instant, but very slowly is it healed. A sin is committed in an instant by
an act of will, and forgiven in an instant when the will submits in love to
God; but the mischief wrought by the sin in our nature is deep, and slow to
mend." See McLaughlin, "Purgatory."
54. Are Catholics the only ones who believe in Purgatory?
The Jews have believed in Purgatory and even amongst the pagans we find the
same belief. "False religions," says McLaughlin, "such as
Buddhism and Spiritualism, have recognized this fact, that at death most men
are not yet fitted for eternal rest. All false religions are built of fragments
of truth, built up into a nightmare of falsehood. Here the question they face
is a real question. All our lives we see before us a high standard calling us
to live up to it, and at death we have not reached it; how are we to reach it
after death? They invent wild and sometimes ghastly answers. But the true
answer is: by the power of God, through the purifying power of suffering; and
this we name Purgatory. These false religions think only of the perfecting of
man’s soul, not of giving God His due. And thereby they leave out the highest
part of man’s perfection.
Certainly man should grieve that he has lowered and degraded himself by sin,
and should rejoice to rise to better things. This grief is a necessary part of
the whole agony entailed by sins; but if it stand alone it is merely pride,
part of a great rejection of truth. For the chief cause of agony ought to be
the knowledge that he has ill-treated God, despised His majesty, outraged His
holiness, rejected His love. The soul in Purgatory, realizing what is due to
God, loving Him with its whole being, will wish above all things to atone for
its sin by suffering worthy punishment. If it could be content to leave in the
smallest degree unrepaired the wrongs it has done to God, it would be far from
the perfection that is possible to saints even in this life. In Purgatory the
soul longs to suffer in order to be clean, to suffer in order to reach God; but
above all these is its longing to suffer in order to make amends to the Divine
Majesty, Holiness, Love. For its love of God is everything to it now; its
desire for its own purification and happiness is part of its love for
God."
55. What was Luther’s error on Purgatory?
"The Church had to condemn an error of Luther’s, that the souls in Purgatory
sin ceaselessly, by desiring rest and shrinking from their sufferings. This
error comes from not understanding that all sin is in the will, and in the act
of the will; the act whereby we choose definitely to do this and not that.
Besides this act of choosing, there are many other desires in our nature; and
these may be the cause of sin, or the material of sin, or the effect of sin;
but they are not sin. Consider a man who has a long-standing dislike of
another, which has often led him to follow trains of thought hostile to that
man, and ending in finding further reasons for disliking him. Sin was committed
in the act of consenting to follow these thoughts. Suppose some day he
recognizes that his dislike is unjust, and from that time resolutely shows
outward kindness to the man, and turns away instantly from all thoughts against
him. His will is acting rightly, but against the grain; for the old habit of
dislike is still in him, ready to break out into action at any moment if he
would allow it. It is true that this dislike is a wrong one. And precisely
because he sees that it is wrong, the man is constantly repressing it, doing
all he can to wear it down and hoping some day to find that it is dead. The
existence of the desire is therefore wrong, a result of sin, but not sinful.
And it is no longer the cause of sins, but is now the material of virtuous acts
every time that the will resists it and acts against it. Such as this are the
habitual desires, attractions, and repulsions that the soul may carry with it
to Purgatory, because they have not yet been worked out of its being in this
life. In Purgatory they must be removed from the soul; not now by work, nor by
the soul’s resisting them and acting against them, but merely by suffering. In
Purgatory such a dislike could never lead to sin. For in this world it leads to
sin because the soul is still in the body. Through the senses, through the
humors and state of the body, the will is provoked or drawn to indulge these
desires or dislikes; and at the same time and for the same reasons, it easily
loses sight of God and His love.
"In Purgatory all the distractions of the body are gone; and the soul’s
love for God absorbs it continuously and prevents it attending to any other
desire. The bad desire or repulsion is latent in the soul, as it is in this
life at the times when it does not trouble a man. But in Purgatory there is no
possibility of its ever breaking out into action. It is simply burning out
slowly in the fire of suffering. Luther did not suggest that the suffering soul
could sin in this way, but in the very fact of finding its sufferings painful.
We have seen that to the soul it is intensely painful to be held away from God,
to know that it has insulted Him and is unfit to approach Him. Plainly it is right
that these things should be painful to the soul; it would be wrong if the soul
could be satisfied with them. And the soul’s act of will is to accept this pain
because it is right. This act of will is completely pleasing to God, but wins
the soul no higher place in heaven. For its place in heaven was won during its
life on earth."
56. How long will souls be kept in Purgatory?
"It is the constant teaching of the Church," says Rev. J. B.
McLaughlin, O.S.B., "that all purgation will be completed when the general
judgment comes at the end of the world. All the souls that are to go to Heaven
will at that judgment be reunited to their bodies and enter into their
everlasting reward. But as to the duration of the purgation of individual souls
we know nothing from our Lord’s teaching. He tells us in a parable, ‘thou shalt
not depart thence till thou pay the last farthing.’ This shows the need of
perfect purity before we can enter Heaven; but reveals nothing about the length
of time of imprisonment. The Church allows perpetual Masses to be arranged for
one soul. This is because she does not know how long that soul may be
suffering, nor how much atonement God will accept on its behalf from men. We
have to remember that all times are alike present to God. There is nothing
unlikely in supposing that prayers and Masses now being offered for one who
died before the Reformation were the means of that soul entering into Heaven
many hundreds of years ago, as our Lord’s Passion was the means of saving
Adam’s soul. The visions God has allowed of souls begging for prayers many
years after their death are evidence that these souls have been in suffering
all that time. And if there are authentic visions where souls have also told
that their Purgatory was to last many years yet, these also may be believed
without fear of contradicting Catholic teaching. Those who are alive at the end
of the world, and whose souls are stained with venial sin or owe a debt of
punishment, must have their purgation like other such souls before they can
enter Heaven. About these, people have wondered over two questions, of which
God has not taught us the answers. First, as to their bodies. Are they to pass
alive into Heaven or hell, or are they to die and rise again at once? And as to
their souls, when are they to suffer their Purgatory, since they are not judged
till the general judgment, and after that judgment there is no Purgatory? This
is ask ing Almighty God how His doings are to be fitted into the tiny measures
of time and space that He has made for our bodily life. He gives us glimpses to
let us know how narrow is our vision, and that we must be content to know that
He is infinitely above our understanding. We must not attempt to limit what He
can do in what we call the ‘moment’ of judgment.’Of this one thing be not
ignorant, my beloved, that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a
thousand years as one day.’ And on our side we know that a moment of intense
anxiety, waiting to know will a falling stone crush a child, seems like an age.
The work of purgation to be done in these souls is the same as in the souls of
the mar tyrs. In the martyrs it is done in their sometimes brief dying. As
easily can God do it at the last day."
57. Was Purgatory always believed in by the early Christians?
"The belief in Purgatory is an excellent example of what is meant by
tradition in the Church. When the belief is challenged, when we are asked to
cease praying for the dead, it is sufficient to answer, ‘But we have been
praying for them since the time of the Apostles.’ The mere fact of praying for
them implies the belief that these souls are not yet in Heaven, nor hopelessly
lost in hell; that they will reach Heaven in the end; that our prayers may help
them. And this, duly weighed, is seen to imply further that the bond which
holds together God’s spiritual family or communion is not mere justice, but
love. Once we realize that the work of His kingdom is to spread in our hearts
love for God and love for each other, it seems quite natural that those, who
have offended Him should be helped by each other’s prayers. All this belief is
embodied in the most effectual way in the practice of praying for the dead; for
by learning that practice and the meaning of it, and by doing it, we learn it
not simply as a thing to believe, but as a fact to be dealt with, and calling
for action. In the Church from the be ginning there has been the practice of
praying for the dead and offering the Mass for them. Very early we find
recorded the custom of offering special prayers and Masses on the thirtieth day
and on the anniversary of death. The writers speak of these things simply as
the established traditional practice of the Church. This traditional practice
of the Church is a running stream of witness to her belief. And when we find
the earliest written references to it speak of it as the traditional and
unquestioned practice of the Church, we have an argument to show that the
doctrine was believed and acted on from the time of the Apostles. When Popes
and Councils are called on to define a doctrine that heretics are challenging
or perverting, they demonstrate what the Church has always believed by
examining the practices which the Church has followed or encouraged, and
pointing out what truths are implied in these practices. The infallible
declaration of Popes and General Councils is argument enough for a Catholic;
for the living voice of the Church teaching even in St. Peter’s time was no
surer nor holier than is the living voice of the Pope today, seeing that always
it is the voice of the Holy Spirit, leading Christ’s Church into all truth, and
bringing back to her mind whatever Christ taught her. But it is sometimes an
encouragement, and al ways a joy, to find St. Gregory the Great or St.
Augustine talking of the prayers and Masses offered for this soul and for that,
and the hope of benefiting such souls, in the same matter of fact and simple
way as a school child talks of them today," etc. See "Purgatory or
The Church Suffering," by Rev. J. B. McLaughlin, O.S.B.
In his "Discourse on Purgatory," Dr. Forbes states:
"Let not the ancient practice of praying, and making ablations for the
dead, received throughout the universal Church of Christ, almost from the very
time of the Apostles, be any more rejected by Protestants, as unlawful or vain.
Let them reverence the judgment of the primitive Church; and admit a practice
strengthened by the uninterrupted profession of so many ages."
The noted historian, W. Mallock, in "Is Life Worth Living," says:
"As to this doctrine of Purgatory which has so long been a stumbling
block to the whole Protestant world time goes on, and the view men take is
changing. It is becoming fast recognized on all sides that it is the only
doctrine that can bring a belief in future rewards and punishments into anything
like accordance with our notions of what is right and reasonable. So far from
its being a superfluous superstition, it seems to be just what is demanded at
once by reason and morality, and a belief in it to be not only intellectual
assent, but a partial harmonizing of the whole moral ideal."
Rev. W. T. Lardge, a nonconformist minister of Preston, England.
"It is a simple and self-evident truth, both from the Scriptures and
common sense, that there must be an intermediate world between Heaven and hell immediately
on leaving this world. This doctrine was at one time acknowledged by the Church
at large. As Christians you are bound to admit the reality of that doctrine, if
you believe in the Bible as the Word of God."
In the "Life of Johnson," by Boswell, the author asks a question
of the man whose life, he is writing, and receives this answer:
"What do you think, sir, of Purgatory, as believed by the Roman
Catholics?" Johnson: ‘Why, sir, it is a very harmless doctrine. They are
of opinion that the generality of mankind are neither so obstinately wicked as
to deserve everlasting punishment, nor so good as to merit being admitted into
the society of blessed spirits; and, therefore, that God is graciously pleased
to allow of a middle state, where they may be purified by a certain degree of
suffering. You see, sir, there is nothing unreasonable in this."’
This one is available in booklet form from www.tanbooks.com as well. And so
are others on various topics.
Next:
I highly recommend the following:
1. HOW THE BIBLE CONVERTED ME TO CATHOLICISM One Protestant Minister's
Pilgrimage by Gerry Matatics . www.catholictreasures.com
2. The Conversion of Scott Hahn (audio tape) www.catholicity.com
3. Rome Sweet Home by Scott & Kimberly Hahn. Excellent book.
4. Surprised by Truth
Surprised by Truth 2, both by Patrick Madrid These are books that contain conversion stories
of real people ranging from Protestants of
varying denominations to Jews, Atheists, even a
former
pagan webmaster.
5. I recommend the following booklets, you
can order hard copies or you can read them on the Web:
WHERE WE GOT THE BIBLE
OUR DEBT TO THE
CATHOLIC CHURCH
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/6480/biblecontents.html
Twenty One Reasons
to Reject Sola Scriptura
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/6480/solascriptura.html
Which Bible
Should You Read?
http://www.tanbooks.com/pdf/wbsyr.pdf
These can all be ordered from Tan Books www.tanbooks.com
6. For a real hardcore in depth study of 3
things Protestants and Catholics debate about get
these:
Not By Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the
Protestant Doctrine of Sola Scriptura
Not By Faith Alone: The Biblical Evidence for the Catholic
Doctrine of Justification
Not By Bread Alone: The Biblical and Historical Evidence
for the Eucharistic Sacrifice
All by Robert Sungenis. Published by Queenship Publishing.
Next:
Bible Basics by Steven Kellmeyer Basilica Press
The Scriptural Roots of Catholic Teaching by
Chantal Epie Sophia Institute Press
Next:
http://olrl.org/apologetics/cathansr.html The Catholic Church has the Answer
http://olrl.org/apologetics/confessrc.html Confession of a Roman Catholic
http://olrl.org/apologetics/churchbible.html The Church or the Bible